V&A East director Gus Casely-Hayford explains how he plans for the new museum in east London to reach a more diverse audience in the final talk as part of our collaboration with Friedman Benda for VDF.
Due to open in 2023, V&A East will comprise a new museum outpost for the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as a new collection and research centre.
Both will be located at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which hosted the London 2012 Olympics and is situated on the boundary of several east London boroughs with large ethnic minority populations.
“This is one of the most diverse parts of London, but also an area that has given us some of the most talented artists in Britain,” Casely-Hayford told curator Glenn Adamson in the last of New York gallery Friedman Benda’s Design in Dialogue interviews that Dezeen is publishing as part of Virtual Design Festival.
“We want those people to feel like this isn’t something that has landed from outer space. It’s an institution that doesn’t just welcome them, but it feels like it belongs to them – that it reflects their loves and their interests and speaks to them in ways that aren’t patronising.”
The new five-storey museum, which is being designed by O’Donnell + Tuomey, will feature traditional exhibitions spaces as well as studio space for workshops and residencies.
“We want to have exhibitions but we want it to be a kind of exhibition interface that will speak to the local population,” Casely-Hayford said.
“The sorts of things that we’re going to be doing within are going to not be the sorts of conventional propositions that you see in most museums.”
“We want to be kind of like an engine of new kinds of possibility, where we’ll engage in partnerships with a variety of different kinds of creatives, but also companies and institutions,” he continued.
“So they might come and do a period of residence and actually be creating their practice on site.”
The museum will form part of a new development called East Bank, which will also host a range of cultural and educational facilities including a campus for the London College of Fashion, a new outpost for the Sadler’s Wells theatre and performance and rehearsal studios for the BBC.
“This is a campus that is surrounded by some of the most diverse but also some of the most disadvantaged communities in Europe,” Casely-Hayford said. “I’m determined that they engage with this space and feel that it is something that they could be proud of.”
“It’s always been this place that has had an inordinate number of deeply gifted and creative people.,” he continued. “And yet, we’ve never invested in the infrastructure to give them the platform to actually realise their dreams.”
“This is an opportunity for us to reinvest in those people who have basically been in the engine room of Britain’s creative success. So I can’t think of a better place for us to have this. This is about facilitating the young in realising their dreams. And it will be, as I see it, a crucible of possibilities.”
“So I think it’s the right proposition at the right time in absolutely the right place.”
Read more on Dezeen: https://www.dezeen.com/?p=1534524
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