V&A Bowie Archive Launches First UK National Tour
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- The V&A is sending more than 100 pieces from its 90,000-item Bowie archive on its first UK national tour, titled "David Bowie: On Tour," opening at V&A Dundee in November 2026 and running through September 2028.
- The exhibition is structured in four parts — photography ("Bowie Through a Lens"), studio and stage work ("All the Somebody People"), cinematic projects ("Hooked to the Silver Screen"), and Bowie's own archiving instinct ("I Can't Give Everything Away") — featuring Kansai Yamamoto's Ziggy Stardust costumes, Bowie's Berlin apartment keys, his childhood saxophone, and a Simpsons script he declined to star in.
- The five confirmed stops — V&A Dundee (Nov 2026–Feb 2027), Blackpool Showtown (Jun–Sep 2027), Bowes Museum County Durham (Oct 2027–Jan 2028), Ferens Art Gallery Hull (Feb–May 2028), and Bristol (Jun–Sep 2028) — each link to a Bowie biography point, with additional venues still to be announced.
- V&A Dundee marks where Bowie played on the 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour; Hull is where his Spiders from Mars band formed after drummer John Cambridge tracked down Mick Ronson working as a parks department gardener for the city council.
- V&A contemporary performance curator Harriet Reed said the archive reveals "an artist in constant motion — a restless, forward-looking mind at work beyond the music and images we know," while director Sir Tristram Hunt called the tour a "landmark national partnership."
- The V&A first exhibited the Bowie archive in 2013, touring it globally to 12 stops through 2018, before opening the permanent Bowie Centre at its East Storehouse in east London last September.
Why it matters: More than 100 previously London-only or never-publicly-displayed Bowie artefacts — including Yamamoto's Ziggy costumes, Bowie's Berlin keys, and a rejected Simpsons script — will travel to five UK cities directly connected to his life, with more stops to come. Music exhibitions have been a winning format for the V&A, following past shows on Taylor Swift, Annie Lennox, and Pink Floyd, and this tour extends that model to a regional audience.
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