About
Simon Tatum is a mixed-media artist from the Cayman Islands-based in Tennessee. Tatum creates drawings, prints, sculptures, digital media, and installations with his visual art practice. His practice loosely follows Du Bois’s message of double consciousness, which described a feeling of in-betweenness towards mixed cultural heritage. Recently, Tatum has been remaking and reassembling Caribbean tourist advertisements from the 1960s and the 1970s through his own authorship, and he is building ceramics sculptures using the pottery wheel. The artwork he creates 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 exhibition installation.