Thanks to a donation, London’s Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) will keep David Bowie’s estate in future and show part of his archive of around 80,000 objects in a permanent exhibition from 2025. As the museum has now announced, the David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts is to be set up in an east London outpost, the so-called V&A East Storehouse in the Stratford district.
The V&A has maintained a long-standing partnership with the Bowie Archive. As early as 2013, three years before Bowie’s death, it showed the touring exhibition “David Bowie is”, which attracted two million visitors worldwide, with around 300 objects that documented the more than 40-year career of the Renaissance man Bowie. The costumes of the fictional characters Ziggy Stardust, designed by Freddie Burretti, and Aladdin Sane, designed by Kansai Yamamoto, would have made a show of their own ten years ago, as would his pioneering collaborations with designers from Armani to Hedi Slimane. Also on view were never-before-seen personal set lists, instruments and lyric sketches, as well as an architectural mockup of the stage design for Bowie’s 1974 Diamond Dogs US tour.
Included in the estate: handwritten texts, letters, sheet music
According to the V&A, the David Bowie Center aims to chart Bowie’s “creative processes as a musical innovator, cultural icon and pioneer of self-expression and reinvention from his early career in the 1960s to his death in 2016”. The archive spans Bowie’s entire career and includes handwritten lyrics, letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, films, music videos, set designs, Bowie’s own instruments and amplifiers, album art and awards. There are also 70,000 photographs, prints, negatives, large format slides and contact sheets by some of the 20th century’s most important photographers, including Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton. The archive also contains private texts and unrealized projects, most of which have never been seen publicly before. In addition to the establishment of the center, the donation is intended to ensure the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.
David Bowie at a concert in Prague in 2004 as part of his “A Reality Tour” world tour.
(Photo: David W Cerny/REUTERS)
The V&A East Storehouse is currently under construction. It is located on the site of the 2012 Olympic Games, now known as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The plans for this arose in 2013 under the then German V&A director Martin Roth. In addition to the Bowie estate, the Storehouse will house the archives of other influential artists and cultural organizations including Vivien Leigh, the Royal Court Theater and the Glastonbury Festival.