From a satellite orbiting Earth for seven years in celebration of Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., the first Black astronaut, to a pulsing neon human skeleton that illuminates Rosalind Franklin’s contributions to the field of science, Tavares Strachan embraces technology and experimental processes to reframe historic narratives.

This month in London, the Royal Academy of Arts opened Entangled Pasts 1768-now. Art, Colonialism and Change, a large-scale survey of works by British art historical giants like J.M.W. Turner, Joshua Reynolds, and John Singleton Copley in dialogue with leading contemporary artists of today like Hew Locke, Yinka Shonibare, Lubaina Himid, and Sonia Boyce. And in the courtyard, an impressive life-size reimagining of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic tempera mural, “The Last Supper,” replaces the Renaissance painting’s subjects with Black scientists, activists, artists, and other prominent figures.

In “The First Supper,”

which took Strachan four years to complete, notable figures include abolitionist Harriet Tubman, activists Marcus Garvey and Marsha P. Johnson, nurse Mary Seacole, and singer-songwriter Sister Rosetta Tharpe, among others. Strachan places former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie in place of Jesus and himself in the role of Judas Iscariot.

Art historian Alayo Akinkugbe suggests in an essay for the exhibition’s catalogue that positioning himself as traitor represents the artist’s betrayal of “history’s status quo by bringing to light these marginalized figures in a composition that is typically associated with Christ and his disciples.” Strachan also continues a long tradition of surreptitiously including a self-portrait within a broader subject, perhaps most famously in Jan van Eyck’s 1434 “Arnolfini Portrait” or Raphael’s famous Vatican fresco, “The School of Athens,” completed between 1509 and 1511.

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