Bowie show comes home to NY

A globe-traversing, crowdpacking exhibition exploring the many sides of David Bowie opens this weekend in its final venue of New York, also the last home of the late rock legend.

David Bowie Is – the show’s title keeps the answer ambiguous – presents Bowie not only as a rock pioneer but as a skilled actor, fashion icon, LGBT hero, inquisitive visual artist and even as a mime artist.

The exhibition, which opened five years ago at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, opened yesterday at its last stand, the Brooklyn Museum, where it will run until July 15.

Curators at the Victoria and Albert said that the exhibition had already drawn nearly 1.8 million visitors in the 11 cities where it had been presented – including Barcelona, Berlin, Chicago, Melbourne, Paris, Tokyo, Toronto and Sao Paulo.

David Bowie Is shows the career trajectory of the artist, who was born in London and settled in the early 1990s in New York, where he died in 2016 from a secret battle with cancer.

When Bowie first visited New York in 1971, in his 20s, he described it as a city “like I fantasised over since by teens”, said Tim Reeve, deputy director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, at a preview.

“So it is fitting indeed that a place that David Bowie came to know as home should be the final stop on an incredible journey,” he said.

The Brooklyn Museum said it has added some 100 objects to the exhibition, to reflect Bowie’s time spent in the US.

A clip from his praised Broadway performance in The Elephant Man can be seen, collaborative drawings with the experimental artist Laurie Anderson, and a section on his 1970s soul excursion.

Visitors are guided by interactive headphones that play songs from Space Oddity to Blackstar.– AFP