V&A East Launches With a Fresh Lens on a 2.8 Million-Object Collection

V&A East Opens in London With 500-Object Galleries and a Major Black British Music Survey

A new chapter for the Victoria & Albert Museum has arrived in east London. V&A East, a $180 million outpost in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, opened with two permanent galleries, “Why We Make,” and a temporary exhibition, “The Music is Black: A British Story,” that traces 125 years of Black British music through about 200 objects.

The museum’s permanent displays bring more than 500 works and artifacts into conversation across time and discipline, using the V&A’s vast collection of more than 2.8 million objects to connect design, identity, and social change. The curatorial approach is deliberately thematic rather than chronological, with objects grouped around ideas such as queer culture, environmental responsibility, and the politics of making.

Among the works on view are references to figures ranging from Leigh Bowery, Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo, Sofonisba Anguissola, Claude Cahun, and Maud Sulter to contemporary artists and designers whose practices speak to the present moment. The aim, according to the museum, is to show how makers across eras have shared “attitudes and agendas” that still resonate today.

“The Music is Black: A British Story” gives institutional space to a history that has often been sidelined. The exhibition moves from early trailblazers such as Winifred Atwell and Shirley Bassey to later generations associated with reggae, ska, drum & bass, grime, and U.K. garage, including Jme and Lil Simz. It also includes works and objects by Ben Enwonwu, Denzil Forrester, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, and Rene Matić, along with a painted vest worn by Stormzy at Glastonbury Festival in 2019.

The new commissions are equally central to the opening. British artist Thomas J Price’s 18-foot bronze figure of a young Black woman holding a smartphone stands at the entrance, while the museum’s “New Work” program begins with projects by Carrie Mae Weems, Es Devlin, Lawrence Lek, and Tania Bruguera.

V&A East is opening alongside V&A East Storehouse, which launched last May and has already drawn attention for its unusual access model. The four-story, 172,222-square-foot facility holds 250,000 objects, 350,000 books, and 1,000 archives, and visitors move through it without the usual museum signposting. In its first six months, nearly a third of visitors were under 35, and more than 45 percent of U.K. visitors were from minority ethnic groups, suggesting the East Bank experiment is reaching audiences museums have long struggled to serve.

For the V&A, the opening is more than an expansion. It is a test of whether a major museum can make its collection feel less like a store of prestige and more like a public argument about who gets represented, and why.