{"id":457645,"date":"2026-05-20T02:26:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T02:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/457645\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T02:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T02:26:11","slug":"with-victoria-albert-museum-expansion-brendan-cormier-argues-for-creativity-in-all-forms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/457645\/","title":{"rendered":"With Victoria & Albert Museum expansion, Brendan Cormier argues for creativity in all forms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The Victoria & Albert Museum in East London. Toronto native Brendan Cormier curates the museum’s new sites, which aim to attract a broad audience.Hufton + Crow\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The Victoria & Albert Museum Storehouse in East London is a vast, densely packed repository of objects. Textiles, televisions, busts and swords rise on shelves to a ceiling 20 metres high.<\/p>\n

Walking through after hours one recent evening, Brendan Cormier pointed out objects in passing \u2013 a 1960s Moulton bicycle, a modern chair by Ernest Race. But what about those statues on the right? \u201cDon\u2019t get me started,\u201d he responded with a laugh. \u201cThe problem of being chief curator of 250,000 objects is that I can only selectively tell you what stuff is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cormier\u2019s task is not to sort through the mass, but to help visitors connect with it. He is chief curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum\u2019s two new sites: the Storehouse, which opened last year to broad acclaim, and V&A East, which opened April 18. Their goal is to open up one of the world\u2019s biggest design collections to a broader audience.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Brendan Cormier.Lewis Vorn\/Supplied<\/p>\n

For a Torontonian raised in a country with no real culture of design, this is a heady place to end up. His work makes a clear argument: that all forms of human creativity are valuable, and that today\u2019s citizens can see themselves in the archive.<\/p>\n

The V&A has an encyclopedic collection that spans art, decorative arts and design. Cormier likes to use an old term to describe his focus: applied arts. \u201cAll the stuff around us, from buildings to objects to spoons to lampposts, has creative thought put into it,\u201d he explained. \u201cOur job here is to say: \u2018Hey, pay attention.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Cormier connects forms of making across time and across cultures, revealing an ever-changing flow of human creativity. \u201cThis museum looks at our collection through a contemporary lens,\u201d Cormier said. \u201cIt asks, \u2019How is creativity changing in today\u2019s world, and how can a museum reveal that change?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The new V&A East building is organized around that premise. The great Irish architects O\u2019Donnell & Tuomey have delivered a five-storey wrapped in a honey-coloured concrete lattice that evokes a Balenciaga dress, or, from certain angles, a giant crab. \u201cThe museum has to have a singular identity,\u201d architect John Tuomey says. \u201cAnd then it has to also invite participation.\u201d <\/p>\n

It does, aided by its setting. Like all U.K. national museums, it is largely free. Neighbours can wander over from the park or the nearby shopping mall, drift past the ground-floor restaurant and enter a collection arranged to meet them where they are.<\/p>\n

Cormier\u2019s team has assembled a permanent exhibition titled Why We Make. \u201cIt\u2019s radically mixing up everything,\u201d he said, during a tour of the collection. \u201cWe have conversations between objects that might span 5,000 years in age and span across the globe.\u201d These are joined by purpose: A 19th-century map of Jain pilgrimage routes and a digital installation<\/a> tracking airline routes across North America, two strongly visual records of connections across the globe. <\/p>\n

These galleries feature a range of pieces from Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s \u2018Daria\u2019 dress, designed by Molly Goddard and worn in her 2020 visual album Black Is King, to Kehinde Wiley\u2019s portrait of the Jamaican-British food writer Melissa Thompson<\/a>. The latter is juxtaposed with a bench where visitors can sit and put themselves on display.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

The V&A’s encyclopedic collection spans art, decorative arts and design.Hufton + Crow\/Supplied<\/p>\n

The exhibition design by JA Projects riffs on the lit signs of the local main streets. \u201cWe\u2019re hoping that youths will find their way in here and just hang out,\u201d says V&A East project director Jen McLachlan. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to have some rules about food and drink, but we\u2019ll find our way.\u201d <\/p>\n

This is culture as a tool to redefine the metropolis. The museum sits on the site of the 2012 Olympics, in what has been the heartland of London\u2019s working class. In the years since the Olympics, London has encouraged the birth of a cultural quarter, East Bank. It is anchored by a new BBC facility; the Sadler\u2019s Wells East dance theatre, a friendly brick box that is also designed by O\u2019Donnell & Tuomey; the London College of Fashion by Allies & Morrison; and V&A East. Just across the green expanse of the Olympic Park is the Storehouse, in a shed that was once the Olympic broadcast centre.<\/p>\n

The Storehouse\u2019s design, by New York architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro, is restrained: polished concrete, exposed ducts and a comfortable caf\u00e9 with plywood counters.<\/p>\n

Its brilliant curatorial gambit is to frame particular objects against the vast bulk of the V&A\u2019s collection, which rests here on open shelves. You walk up a narrow stair, or rise in a generic elevator, into the central collections hall. To one side rests a Gretsch hollow-body guitar that belonged to PJ Harvey. To the left, a massive fragment from the concrete fa\u00e7ade of Robin Hood Gardens, a social housing complex that was an emblem of postwar social housing and then of its demolition.<\/p>\n

Will Toronto\u2019s new car-free street pave a different path?<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you get up to the second floor of the Storehouse, you can peek through the Robin Hood Gardens windows to see the red-and-purple graphic wallpaper that hung in the halls. Nearby, Cormier\u2019s team has deployed recordings of oral histories from residents. This story bridges the gap between global design culture and the concerns of regular citizens. Nearby, displays tell the stories of local brickmakers and a 1970s feminist press. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a nimble model of curation that allows visitors a degree of freedom and constantly renews the curatorial offerings. \u201cThere\u2019s something democratic about it,\u201d Cormier says. \u201cEverybody\u2019s eyes can wander and pick out what they\u2019re interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Storehouse is a riff on the genre of the \u201ccabinet of curiosities,\u201d the Victorian collections that threw together colonial spoils. It makes a bold gambit: To open up the archive, to tell accurate stories about tens of thousands of objects and also to let the public appreciate the quantity of what has come before.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Like all U.K. national museums, entry to the V&A is largely free.Hufton + Crow\/Supplied<\/p>\n

Cormier has spent two decades getting here \u2013 entering the museum world, as he says, \u201cthrough the side door.\u201d Raised in the suburban neighbourhood of New Toronto, he studied urban planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, but the field didn\u2019t suit him \u2013 it was too abstract, he recalls. Meanwhile the related field of urban design, which focuses on blocks and streets, meant \u201ca New Urbanism-lite vision for how the city should be,\u201d generating plans that \u201cwould never really be followed and weren\u2019t very interesting in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chasing more imaginative solutions, he formed a collective called Department of Unusual Certainties with two friends, and they self-assigned research projects to understand phenomena such as the design of tiny parks. <\/p>\n

After urban-design training at the Bauhaus in Germany, Cormier took a left turn into publishing in Rotterdam as an editor with design journal Volume. After another project in Shenzhen, China, he applied to become curator of the V&A\u2019s new gallery<\/a> in that city, and got the job. \u201cIt was the most remarkable coup of my life,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

At the V&A, most curators are scholars with narrow academic training. Cormier is a generalist and a communicator. \u201cWhat\u2019s important to me isn\u2019t as much the individual objects as the systems and landscapes that go into making them,\u201d he says. On the top floor of V&A East, Cormier has brought together photographs of the workshops and recycling plants that used to occupy this part of London. For him, the museum is part of a process worthy of contemplation.<\/p>\n

There are few such opportunities in Canada. No major Canadian museum specializes in design; the only specialized architecture museum, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, is heavily international in its focus.<\/p>\n

Cormier\u2019s career path helps tell this story. Two Toronto institutions that served as his stepping stones \u2013 the Design Exchange and the small Architecture Gallery at Harbourfront Centre \u2013 are now defunct. As Cormier wrote in an op-ed for The Globe<\/a>, the Design Exchange\u2019s 2019 closure left Canada \u201cone of the only advanced economies in the world not to have its own design museum.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the V&A he is helping to reframe the systems that shape our world, and to build a base of knowledge that will someday pay dividends for British, if not Canadian, society. \u201cWhat happens when you have a population fluent in the appreciation of architecture, fluent in the idea that design can transform a society?\u201d he asks. \u201cThat\u2019s an interesting thing in the Canadian context. What kind of country do we want to build?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The Victoria & Albert Museum in East London. Toronto native Brendan Cormier curates…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":457646,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60,19293],"class_list":["post-457645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=457645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/457645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/457646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=457645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=457645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=457645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}