The Music is Black opens the new V&A East in London on 18 April with an exhibition that carries a clearly programmatic significance from the outset. As the museum’s first major exhibition project, The Music is Black: A British Story addresses a history long marginalised within institutional narratives, showing how Black British music has profoundly shaped UK culture and generated a lasting global impact. The exhibition spans 125 years of Black music in Britain, from the jazz of early twentieth-century communities to reggae, 2 Tone and drum and bass, through to trip hop, UK garage, grime and contemporary scenes. Through archival materials, objects, artworks and installations, the show brings to light lesser-known stories of pioneers, international music makers and today’s artists, from Sampha and Little Simz to Jorja Smith and Ezra Collective, weaving together creativity, cultural industries and social and political contexts. Rather than offering a purely celebratory account, the exhibition foregrounds the dimensions of conflict, resistance and resilience that have accompanied these practices over time. Music is presented as a space of excellence but also as a site of struggle, capable of generating languages that have crossed class boundaries, generations and geographical borders, redefining British cultural identity. Alongside the exhibition, V&A East launches a partnership with BBC Music and collaborates with East Bank partners on the The Music is Black Festival at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The programme reinforces the idea of the museum as a space engaged with living cultures and the present, marking the opening of V&A East with a clear curatorial stance that entrusts music with the task of telling a cultural history finally brought into view.
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