The V&A East has announced tickets are now on sale for its inaugural exhibition, The Music Is Black: A British Story – an unapologetic account of how Black creativity has shaped the sound of Britain for more than a century.
Opening on 18 April 2026 at the new V&A East Museum in Stratford’s East Bank, the exhibition traces 125 years of music forged through migration, resistance, experimentation and joy. Rock to grime, jungle to UK garage, the exhibition tells a story that has long been central to British culture – even when it has gone uncredited.
This is no greatest-hits parade.
The Music Is Black unfolds across four acts, blending sound, image and object into a multisensory experience. More than 200 items are on display, including 60 newly acquired works, spanning instruments, fashion, photography, artwork and personal artefacts.
Among the highlights: Winifred Atwell’s piano, played by the first Black artist to top the UK charts; Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar; a Super Nintendo and copy of Mario Paint used by Jme in his earliest experiments with beat-making; and Eddie Otchere’s photographs of drum and bass pioneers Kemistry and Storm. Fashion pieces range from Dame Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger dress to Little Simz’s Comme des Garçons ensemble and Skin’s confrontational green suit and spiked headpiece, worn when she became the first Black woman to headline Glastonbury.
The exhibition also pulls lesser-told histories into view. Objects linked to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, commissioned for the first Pan-African Conference in 1900, sit alongside works by artists including Sonia Boyce, Zak Ové and Denzil Forrester, as well as newly commissioned pieces by Sir Frank Bowling and LR Vandy.
Curator Jacqueline Springer describes the exhibition as an exploration of music not just as entertainment, but as social record and emotional force.
“Music reflects and feeds emotions,” she says.
“It inspires, comforts, offends and entertains – and it carries the histories of the people who make it.”
That sense of continuity runs through the exhibition’s structure. It begins with African musical foundations and the legacies of enslavement, moves through early 20th-century Britain and postwar migration, and builds towards the emergence of distinctly Black British genres – before turning its attention to the present and future, from drill to afrobeats.
The exhibition is partnered with BBC Music, which will contribute archival material and a season of related programming. It will also launch The Music Is Black Festival in summer 2026, a programme of performances and events across East Bank, developed with organisations including Sadler’s Wells East, UAL’s London College of Fashion and UCL East.
For V&A East, this opening exhibition reads as both an introduction and a declaration of intent. As director Gus Casely-Hayford puts it, the museum aims to be “a hub for collaboration, creativity and celebration” – and The Music Is Black sets that tone with confidence.
