Inside the V&A Storehouse’s David Bowie Centre
The David Bowie Centre will open its doors for the first time this weekend. Here's what you can expect.
By Nick Reilly
As the V&A prepares to unveil the David Bowie Centre this weekend, one of the museum’s leading curators has told Rolling Stone UK about the task of making the music icon’s archive accessible to the public for the first time.
The Bowie Centre is located at the V&A East Storehouse and has become the permanent home for the singer’s archive, which was acquired following his death in 2016.
But instead of being a traditional museum environment, the Storehouse, which opened in May, offers an experience that’s somewhere in-between a gargantuan IKEA-esque warehouse and an Aladdin’s Cave. Floor upon floor of eclectic items from across the V&A’s entire collection are on display, and they can all be ordered by visitors to be individually examined within the facility’s study rooms.
The same goes for the Bowie Centre, which can be found on the second floor and hosts a small exhibition which displays a number of items from across Bowie’s life. There’s an early Ziggy outfit, a heartfelt letter from his dad to a label which praises his son’s relentless work ethic, and even an early rejection letter from Apple Records.
There is also a guest-curated display, which will be rotated at various intervals featuring the picks of artists who either had a personal connection with Bowie or have been inspired by him. For the opening months that means long-term Bowie collaborator and Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers, alongside Bowie devotees The Last Dinner Party.
For Bowie fans, however, it’s undoubtedly the chance to get up close and personal with these thousands of items that will act as the real pull. After all, this is the opportunity to order something from Bowie’s *actual* archive and discover it for yourself.
“You’re learning about the tools that Bowie used for his own creative practice,” explains curator Dr Madeleine Haddon. But you’re not only learning about that in the context of David Bowie, we frame it in such a way that you’re thinking about how to apply that to your own work.”
She adds: “You’ll see the sheer volume of what Bowie saved and things that could seem incredibly banal, like scraps of paper and notebooks with musings and writings. They’re some of the most fascinating parts of the archive and every piece of that is part of his journey.”
The Centre is here to inspire a new generation of artists and researchers, of course, but it doesn’t have to be just that. If you’re simply a fan wanting a quiet moment for the archive of *actual* bloody David Bowie, then that’s fine too.
Haddon also says the space is a perfect representation of how the V&A, which will open its main East London site in Stratford early next year, is aiming to be a museum for everyone.
“Bowie was constantly reinventing themselves and trying new things and, you know, experimenting and that allows such a wide range of people to have a connection with him,” she says.
“That’s our focus at V&E East, you know, we really want this to be a museum of the future and a museum for young people. So we’ve done a lot of work thinking about the next generation of museum-goers and how they can have an experience with Bowie. We want to emphasise that he was a multi-hyphenate creative before that term really existed, back when you were pressured to stay within a singular genre.
“Young people today want to be creatives and love to think of all the different fields that they can experiment with and not having to be boxed in. Bowie was such a pioneer for that. And I think that makes him have such resonance.”
The David Bowie Centre opens tomorrow…