The director of the forthcoming V&A East in London wants to transform the visitor experience with digital technology, to address colonialism – and to bring in young people
Gus Casely-Hayford, the V&A East’s first director, discovered art in the most tender of ways. As a young boy on a snowy day, lying beside a radiator, he watched his older brother Joseph as he drew. “I had this realisation that you could take a pencil and a pad and you could turn it into something of a whirlwind. It’s that sense of both ingenuity and possibility that I fell in love with. I’ve spent most of my career pursuing being close to that kind of excellence.”
How do you build those genuine and unexpected sparks of inspiration into the infrastructure of a brand new museum? It’s a question Casely-Hayford, after spending two years in America as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, has returned to the UK to answer. He started his new post last spring leading a project to build and launch two sister sites in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London: a five-storey museum at Stratford waterfront and, 10 minutes’ walk away, a four-storey collection and research centre at Here East. As V&A East, both will open in 2023 and join BBC Music, Sadler’s Wells, University College London, and the UAL’s College of Fashion as part of East Bank, the mayor’s £1.1bn creative quarter and Olympic legacy project.
