Tarver's work addresses the complexity and invisibility of black female identity in the Western landscape, from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress.

Working in painting, sculpture, installation, textiles, photography, and video, Tarver often uses the tropics as a starting point to look at the complexity of origin stories and histories of displacement. Using this familiar imagery, she confronts artists like Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau and their imaginations of the tropics, considering the problematic perspective from which they were creating, and challenging the ideas they have perpetuated.