A new exhibition at London’s Barbican Music Library is exploring the past 100 years of Black British music.
Black Sound London opened earlier this month and will be on display at the Barbican until July 19. It aims to explore “the outsized impact British Black music has had on the world stage”, covering genres such as jazz, lovers’ rock, jungle, grime and drill.
The exhibition uses vintage mixtapes, magazine covers, fly-posted walls and various other ephemera to tell the story of the past century and demonstrate “how these genres have evolved into powerful statements of identity and resistance”, the Barbican Music Library said in a statement. It’s co-curated by music journalist and author Lloyd Bradley and designer Scott Leonard, using the 1919 arrival of the US-based Southern Syncopated Orchestra in London as its starting point.
“Too often in this country, Black cultural heritage is packaged presented to the people by those that weren’t there, so this type of exhibition at Barbican Music Library and the ‘heritage collecting’ days reverse the lens,” Leonard said in a BBC interview. “They enable and empower the British Black music community to tell their stories of what it was, and what it meant to them, because they must be captured and preserved before these stories disappear forever.”
Find out more about Black Sound London here.
