The story of black British music is writ large in the first exhibition at the V&A East| Exhibitions

Jacqueline Springer stands in the middle of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new exhibition space and looks wistfully at a pair of drain pipe trousers, a tailored suit jacket and a pig hat, creating the unmistakable silhouette of Pauline Black, lead singer of the group 2 Tone the Selector.

Springer is the curator of the Victoria and Albert East Museum’s inaugural exhibition, ‘Music is Black’, a historical survey of black British music, which opens this weekend. It starts with early African drumming and takes us straight into the latest innovations in pop music, drilling through jungle, dirt, garage and two-tone.

Over the course of three years, the former journalist turned academic and art curator has amassed 200 objects, including many permanent collectibles, although some – such as Pauline Black’s clothes – remain tantalizingly elusive. “She wants them back,” Springer says with mock frustration.

Although some items are here temporarily, Springer hopes the show will be part of a lasting change, not only in terms of artefacts finding their way into collections but also in terms of how black British music is viewed. “Institutionally, this is an endorsement,” she says. “The V&A recognized that black music deserved this kind of coverage.”

The Music is Black falls within an ongoing series of black British music exhibitions: there was the British Library exhibition Beyond the Bassline and the Barbican’s survey of the black London music scene. In 2022, Sonia Boyce’s show Feeling Her Way, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, focused on black women’s voices, and Tate Modern’s Soul of a Nation touched on several themes in its inaugural show at the V&A East. Springer points to the British Library and Barbican exhibitions, but says: “This is a big deal.”

The scope and scale are certainly much greater than those previous offerings. The 200 items, which begin with a drum sculpture by Ben Enwonwu and end with a piece by Turner Prize nominee Rene Matich, have been given the V&A treatment, putting them on the same institutional footing as recent V&A blockbusters such as the Cartier exhibition.

Outside the museum, there seems to be a shift as well. The Mobo Awards just turned 30 years old; Black acts, including Olivia Deen, Skepta and Salt, dominated the British. Black music accounts for 80% of the money the industry has made in the UK in the last 30 years, new research has claimed.

Music is Black is part of a wider drive to reposition the black British voice as central to the UK’s cultural story, says Joss Casely-Hayford, artistic director of the Victoria and Albert East Museum. “What often happens is that British music is presented as important but marginal,” he says. “What we tried to do here is to say that this is our story, and this is one of our major contributions to the world.”

It’s the inaugural offering from the newest part of an organization that seems to be expanding endlessly. It follows the V&A East Storehouse and the Young V&A next door in Bethnal Green. Farther north is the V&A Dundee Museum, which opened in 2018 and starred in the film Succession.

The new addition in Stratford has been designed by O’Donnell & Tuomey, which describes the £135m building as a ‘wind jacket’. Some coverage may be necessary: ​​it has already been criticized by some as “ugly”, “perverted” and looking like a “reconstructed Toblerone bar”, although The Guardian’s review called it a triumph.

Economic reality has punctured the luster of the opening. Campaign groups have organized an open letter to the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tristram Hunt, calling for all museum workers to be paid a living wage. So far, more than 21 thousand people have signed it.

Despite the bumps, there were hundreds of people in long, winding lines preparing for the museum’s official opening on Tuesday and Wednesday. Among those in attendance was Karen Gapay, a Mancunian DJ and journalist, who said the exhibition was clearly focused on giving space to overlooked figures – such as Hywan Clarke, the Hacienda’s original resident DJ whose Blue Spot radial chart has been acquired for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

“I was talking to Norman Jay at the launch event,” Gabbay said. “There aren’t a lot of household names here, but there are a lot of pioneers,” he said.

The Victoria and Albert Museum hopes its latest expansion will be similarly innovative.