About

Simon Tatum is an interdisciplinary artist from The Cayman Islands based in Nashville, Tennessee. His works center procedures that loosely follow Du Bois’s message of double-consciousness. He focuses on the actions of undoing, remaking, disassembling, and reassembling print imagery (ex: advertisements/ documentary images) and found objects through his own authorship. The imagery and objects he chooses to manipulate are relevant to his interests in colonial narratives, tourism, and his personal identity as a mixed-race Caribbean male who grew up negotiating foreign expectations of cultural aesthetics.

Tatum was born in George Town, Grand Cayman. He received his Bachelor of Art degree from the University of Missouri (USA) in 2017, and he received his Master of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture and Expanded Media from Kent State University (USA) in 2021. Tatum’s thesis showcase titled the Romantic Caribbean featured at the Kent State University’s CVA gallery in March 2021, and he has shown a solo exhibition within the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands titled Looking Back and Thinking Ahead. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions which include, Arrivants: Art and Migration in Anglophone Caribbean World at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (2018), and he participated with the Alice Yard contingent for Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany (2022), showing posters from his series See Your Travel Agent. Tatum was honoured in 2016 with an international travel grant from the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands to attend the Caribbean Linked IV residency programme in Oranjestad, Aruba. Moreover, he is also the first graduate scholar sponsored by the Peter N Thomson Family Foundation in Grand Cayman to pursue a graduate programme.

Alongside his studio art practice, Tatum exercises skills in art administration and writing.