‘Everybody should have transformative experiences with works of art.’ Dr Madeleine Haddon, Curator of the new V&A East, on keeping creative.
New York born Madeleine has been in her scene-stealing new role for a year. Set to open in 2025, the V&A East Museum and Storehouse are shaking up the art world. The museum will be a more traditional space, ‘but still with that transhistorical, cross-cultural breadth of the V&A’s collection’, and the Storehouse is set to offer visitors an immersive experience, traversing through pieces previously tucked away out of the public domain. Madeleine calls it ‘visible storage’ and it’s hard to imagine the sheer scale and scope of the work that will be displayed, and what it will feel like to walk amongst it. I think about dusting off my Art GCSE portfolio that’s buried in the cellar. ‘It’ll be nice when our official offices are open and to be a bit more tethered down’, Madeleine muses, ‘but I enjoy having the freedom to really be where I need to be.’ As they’re still in the planning stages, Madeleine’s days involve lots of studio visits.
‘In both sites we’ll have artists’ commissions around a specific theme throughout the buildings and those will rotate. Kind of like the turbine hall at the Tate. So I’m doing a lot of thinking about who we’ll select for the first two years. And a lot of running around and seeing things.’
A painter in high school, Madeleine came to an Art History course as a means to her MFA (Master of Fine Arts), but it fast became her passion. ‘I was always somebody who loved history and thinking about how objects inform our surroundings, inform our understanding of each other and inform our broader narratives. So this was bringing both my creative and intellectual sides together.’
I wonder if being a curator was always in her path?‘ Once I took my first Art History course in university, I just never looked back. I had an internship in the Met in the costume institute and I fell in love - I’m not really trained to do anything else except be a curator’. A BA from Yale and PhD from Princeton are high academic accolades, so naively I imagined someone less hands-on and more desk-bound than Madeleine. But her stint at MoMA, the transatlantic lifestyle she led when she was freelance and her time spent studying at the Museo del Prado in Madrid demonstrate her absolute passion for drinking in the world around her, which she would argue is vital to her position.
‘You have to keep your freshness and creativity alive. As a curator, you’re creating spaces of wonder and excitement and if you’re not bringing that to the work itself then you’re not going to transmit it to your visitors and audience. It’s that intangible quality of the work that I try to keep an eye on.’
Madeleine’s dedication to the project and the artists she hopes to collaborate with is catching. ‘Despite being trained in 19th century painting and thinking about artists who are dead a lot of the time, I like to really be in dialogue, I don’t like it being prescriptive. I’m really trying to nurture what it is that the artist wants to do’.
Placing the artist and the visitor at the forefront of the experience feels fresh and novel, which is strange considering that this connection is what museums were created for in the first place. Somehow we’ve lost our way. ‘It’s a really special undertaking getting to shape a new museum, but as this little start-up within such a big established organisation and institution’.
Madeleine tells me that they have recently acquired David Bowie’s archive and it suddenly all clicks into place. ‘He is someone who has so many different sounds, personalities, personas, so he’s kind of this amazing model for thinking about creativity and reinvention. We’re really trying to connect with young people in particular, and he’s just such a fantastic influence’.
I feel excited about the future of museums in the hands of Dr Haddon. She tells me that in the morning she needs an hour of quiet to get her ready for the day. Meditating, journaling, the gym, and then she’s good to go. But without that hour of introspective calm, the external inspiration becomes harder to find.
The yin and the yang.
And with that, she’s off. Delving into ancient objects, meeting new artists and plotting the opening of a space in Stratford to inspire the minds of the future.
October, 2023
