Can the V&A’s New Museum Fulfill Its Democratic Promise?
The Victoria and Albert Museum has opened its long-planned East London outpost, V&A East, alongside the V&A East Storehouse, as part of a broader expansion that has included V&A Dundee (2018) and the redeveloped Young V&A (reopened 2023). V&A East is part of a £660 million (about $893 million) redevelopment funded by London’s City Hall and is located in Stratford, an area reshaped by investment tied to the London Olympics. The museum says its collection galleries were co-designed with a Youth Collective of East Londoners aged 16–25, who also collaborated with Cuban artist Tania Bruguera on a stained-glass commission titled Towards A Civic Museum. The displays include 500 objects arranged around themes such as identity, social justice, and environmental action, including a juxtaposition of a 2020 portrait by Kehinde Wiley with a miniature self-portrait by an “unrecorded painter” dated circa 1530–1620, and a focus on artists connected to East London such as Thomas J Price and Molly Goddard.
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This story was covered in Auction Fever, Museum Power Plays