The Victoria & Albert Museum has announced that The Last Dinner Party and Nile Rodgers will both curate special exhibitions for the David Bowie Centre.
The centre will open its doors on September 13 at the V&A East Storehouse, after originally being teased back in February 2023. As described on the V&A website, it will give fans the chance to “step into the creative worlds of David Bowie – artist, disruptor, icon. Explore the costumes, sounds, lyrics, and sketches that mapped his many reinventions and use his radical imagination as a springboard to something new.”
A number of special displays will be curated for the exhibitions – with over 90,000 of Bowie’s personal items being on show over nine special displays.
We are thrilled to announce that the exceptional archive of legend @DavidBowieReal is coming to the V&A! Spanning 80,000 items across his 60 year career, you can explore Bowie’s life’s work in ways never possible before at @vam_east Storehouse from 2025 #DavidBowieArchive pic.twitter.com/sTGtJnydKB
— V&A (@V_and_A) February 23, 2023
Two of the displays are being curated by the aforementioned Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party. Rodgers has selected items that reflect his and Bowie’s “shared love of the music that had both made and saved our lives”.
Speaking of the exhibition, Rodgers said: “My creative life with David Bowie provided the greatest success of his incredible career, but our friendship was just as rewarding. Our bond was built on a love of the music that had both made and saved our lives.”
Although The Last Dinner Party didn’t have the same personal relationship with Bowie as Nile Rodgers did, ‘Ziggy Stardust’ certainly had a major inspiration on the bands musical journey.
The ‘Prelude To Ecstasy’ rockers curation will include exclusive photos by Mick Rock of Bowie in the studio, his Electronic Music Studios synthesiser user manual, writings from the 1976 ‘Station To Station’ tour and Bowie’s handwritten lyrics for ‘Win’.
The group recently unboxed several items and artefacts of Bowie’s in a YouTube video for V&A. Check it out below.
Speaking of the inspiration Bowie gave to them, The Last Dinner Party said: “David Bowie continues to inspire generations of artists like us to stand up for ourselves. Bowie is a constant source of inspiration to us.
“When we first started developing ideas for TLDP, we took a similar approach to Bowie developing his ‘Station To Station’ album – we had a notebook and would write words we wanted to associate with the band.”
As for the opportunity to curate a display for the Bowie Centre, the band said: “It was such a thrill to explore Bowie’s archive, and see first-hand the process that went into his world-building and how he created a sense of community and belonging for those that felt like outcasts or alienated – something that’s really important to us in our work too.”
The David Bowie Centre opens on September 13 with entry being free, but ticketed. Tickets will be available to book at a later date from here.
