About
In his prints, multi-media drawings, and sculptural installations, Simon Tatum filters what he frequently describes as “colonial debris” through subjects and references as diverse as tourist pamphlets designed for Grand Cayman hotels in the 1960s, collected chinaware from United States thrift stores, a 1970s romantic thriller movie, science fiction television characters, and video recordings of public parks and motorways from various islands in the Caribbean . As an artist who is frequently interested in learning new methods for sharing experiences, Tatum made use of his training with ceramic media in his recent project The Travelers (2025), a multi-media installation that shares audio clippings of a conversation with his grandmother speaking about his (Tatum’s) great-grandfather’s warning of keeping an eye of international news and world events happening off their home island in the 1960s. This audio is paired with clips featuring speeches from Caribbean writers, cultural historians, and leaders like Maurice Bishop, CLR James, and Fidel Castro —each issuing their own warnings about post-colonial developments in the Caribbean region. This chorus of audio is woven together and placed with video projections Tatum recorded of a public park in Nassau. And all these audio and video components are further enhanced through their outlets —customly designed, symmetrical ceramic canisters that Tatum designed to project the audio.
Like his earlier projects that empower a personal iconography — e.x., his glass tanks that held hand-crafted portrait busts and arrangements of flowers suspended in water—Tatum’s new project shares his mindset of thinking about his familial past in the present tense. Moreover, all of Tatum’s projects are relevant to his interests in colonial narratives, tourism, and his identity as a mixed-race Caribbean male who grew up negotiating expectations of cultural aesthetics.
Simon Tatum is a mixed-media artist born in the Cayman Islands-based in the United States. Tatum received his Bachelor of Arts 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 Kent State University’s CVA gallery in March 2021, and he shared a selection of works from his thesis during the Sculpture X Symposium hosted at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, USA. Moreover, he is also the first scholar sponsored by the Peter N Thomson Family Foundation in Grand Cayman to pursue a graduate program.
Tatum has shown a two-person exhibition with Matthew Ballow at Vanderbilt University’s Sarratt Gallery in 2024. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, which included Arrivants: Art and Migration in Anglophone Caribbean World at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (2018) and the In Relations exhibition at TERN Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas (2024). He was honored in 2025 to be one of the “top 10 emerging artists to watch” by a committee of international curators for the RiseArt Online Platform. He was also selected to participate with the Alice Yard contingent during Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany (2022) at the trafohaus venue, showing posters from his series See Your Travel Agent that were produced and curated by toofprint press.
Alongside his studio art practice, Tatum exercises skills in art administration, art handling, and exhibition installation. Tatum has worked for Vanderbilt University’s Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice research initiative since 2023. In his role as Program Coordinator, he has worked with curators and artists to organize and install 12 different curatorial projects at Vanderbilt’s Begonia Labs. He has also previously worked at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands as an Assistant Curator, where he helped organize 10 exhibitions alongside the Chief Curator and curated an exhibition for Ella Latter, a photographer from Grand Cayman who was under-recognized.