“I really love lost stories,” the artist Tavares Strachan says in his 2023 TED talk, “A Home for Lost Stories.” Strachan goes on to tell the audience that he was the first Bahaman to set foot on the North Pole, and how on that trip he began hearing about Matthew Henson, the Black man who was the first person to ever stand on the North Pole, in 1909, just ahead of his expedition-mate Robert Peary. “Now, this son of a sharecropper had managed over seven Arctic expeditions,” Strachan continues. “Yet his massive, massive contributions became lost to history. And I ain’t really cool with that.” Thus Strachan’s own quest began. He started writing, one by one, stories of unrecognized achievement; he then hired a team of researchers to help, and together they created The Encyclopedia of Invisibility—a book of 3,000 pages and over 17,000 entries. Sometimes Strachan uses pages from the book to create powerful installations. In this exhibition at Blanton, a version of the Encyclopedia is on view, along with three sculptures from Strachan’s “Black Madonna” series and a new installation. —Laura Jacobs