Simon Tatum (b. 1995, George Town, Grand Cayman) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work 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 authorship. The imagery and objects he chooses to manipulate are
relevant to his interests in colonial narratives, tourism, and his identity as a mixed-race Caribbean male
who grew up negotiating foreign expectations of cultural aesthetics.
Tatum received his Bachelor of Art degree from the University of Missouri (USA) in 2017, and his Master
of Fine Arts Degree in Sculpture and Expanded Media from Kent State University (USA) in 2021. Tatum
thesis showcase, titled The Romantic Caribbean, was featured at 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 honored in 2016 with
an international travel grant from the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands to attend the Caribbean
Linked IV residency program 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 program.
Tatum currently works and resides in Nashville, Tennessee.