V&A secures David Bowie archive with £10m donation from Blavatnik Family Foundation & Warner Music.
The acquisition follows the V&A’s blockbuster 2013 exhibition, David Bowie Is…, which marked the first time a museum had been given unprecedented access to the David Bowie Archive. The exhibition was seen by over two million people around the world as part of its international tour, becoming one of the V&A’s most popular exhibitions of all time.
Acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum (V and A), the exhibition will include more than 80,000 items that span six decades of the cultural icon’s career. (independent.ie)
They will be made available to the public through the creation of The David Bowie Centre for the Study of Performing Arts, which will open in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
It will allow fans and researchers alike to get up close and gain new insights into Bowie’s creative process like never before, the V and A said.
The collection will feature handwritten lyrics, letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, photography, film, music videos, set designs, album artwork and awards.
It will also include instruments owned by the world-famous musician, as well as writings and unrealised projects never before seen in public.
David Bowie’s Personal Art Collection
Highlights include stage costumes such as Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust ensembles, designed by Freddie Burretti in 1972, Kansai Yamamoto’s creations for the Aladdin Sane tour in 1973, and the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and Alexander McQueen for the 1997 Earthling album cover.
A photograph from the photo session for David Bowie’s 1973 album Aladdin Sane has been gifted to the V&A as it announced record visitor figures for its world-touring David Bowie is exhibition.
The V&A said that the archive of the late photographer Brian Duffy had donated a print of a colour transparency image, from the photo session that led to one of the world’s most recognisable album covers.
The gift celebrates a milestone for the V&A’s Bowie show, which will welcome its 2-millionth visitor during its run at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the final stage of a world tour that began five years ago.
But David Bowie Is ends in triumph anyway. The floor-to-ceiling screens showing live footage are genuinely awe-inspiring, a final room collects together umpteen examples of how his influence has leaked not just into music but everyday life: fashion, packaging, video game design, advertising. As it turned out, the plan about communicating ideas that Bowie outlined in the Beckenham Arts Lab proposal seems to have worked out perfectly.
The exhibition David Bowie IS is the first international retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie one of the most influential performers and visionaries of modern times.
Over 300 exhibits including the original handwritten lyrics, original costumes, photographs, set designs, album covers and rare performances of material that cover five decades of the artist's activities collected and exhibited, for the first time in absolute and exclusive in Italy, from the David Bowie Archive.
The multimedia experience of the project shows introduced with Sennhieser cutting-edge technology, joined to stage productions and video installations and original video animations, it is designed to lead the visitor in an emotional journey through the artistic influences that the same Bowie cited as formative.2.-Publicity-photograph-for-the-Kon-rads-1966-1
