In Conversation With… Jacqueline Springer, Curator of the V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition The Music is Black: A British Story 

Jacqueline Springer’s journey to curating V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition began with a love for words. Growing up in London, she was an avid reader, borrowing stacks of books from the local library and arranging them in her room to make it look like a little library of her own. “It’s always been about writing,” she reflects. “It’s always been about stories, about words.” Looking back, she sees a clear connection between her early love of language and the role music would later play in her life: both tell stories, create atmosphere, and help make sense of feeling and experience. 

Circumstances propelled her into the corporate world, but writing never fell away. Jacqueline began building a second life as a freelance music journalist, reviewing gigs and writing for the Black music press in her evenings. One of her first assignments was to review Incognito at the Jazz Café: “I arrived so early at the venue, they were putting out the peanuts”. Later, while juggling freelance work with a day job, she found herself running to an interview with The Notorious B.I.G., trying to make a cover story happen on a fee that barely covered the journey. “I remember thinking that I was haemorrhaging my emotions to get this done,” she says. The pace was unsustainable, but it confirmed where she wanted to be. 

A turning point came when a future boss at Radio 1 saw her work and asked whether she would consider broadcasting. Jacqueline joined the BBC ahead of the launch of 1Xtra, its first radio station dedicated to Black music, and later worked across other parts of the organisation, including the Caribbean Service for the World Service. Radio sharpened her instincts as a storyteller. “I was writing with my mouth,” she says, describing the discipline of working within tight time limits while still conveying meaning and context. Over time, that instinct grew into a wider interest in long form research and illustrated lectures. She moved into higher education: working for a decade as an Adjunct Professor for Syracuse and Fordham Universities’ and a Visiting Lecturer for the University of Westminster. By the time she joined the V&A in 2021, the role felt like the natural culmination of years spent thinking, writing and speaking about music and culture. 

Only a few months after arriving at the museum, Jacqueline was invited to meet the Director of V&A East, Dr Gus Casey Hayford, and was asked what exhibition she would make if given the opportunity. Her answer was immediate: “Black music, of course.” Jacqueline’s starting point was 1900, a moment she associates with the rise of mass communication and the modern music industry, although she notes the importance of looking further back “to older histories of communication, migration, enslavement, diaspora and cultural transformation.” 

The resulting exhibition spans 125 years, from 1900 to 2025, and asks two closely related questions: what is Black music, and what is Black British music? “For me the answer lies partly in continuity and partly in change. The exhibition traces long musical lineages shaped by the dispersal of African peoples and the creation of new forms in new worlds, while also paying particular attention to the decades from the 1970s onwards, when Black artists born in Britain began making music grounded in their own distinctly Black British identities. In that sense, the exhibition is not simply a survey of genres or stars, but an exploration of how music carries memory, movement, politics and belonging across generations.” 

Her curatorial approach is especially revealing in the way she has thought about objects. Rather than asking artists and lenders for iconic memorabilia, she invited them to think about which items best expressed musical talent or the process of making music. What interested her more was something “richer and personal”, objects that would help visitors understand the work behind the music rather than only the market around it.  

That emphasis on experience, influence and connection also shapes the exhibition’s closing section. Jacqueline describes the Huo Family Foundation’s support as “pivotal”, particularly in enabling a technologically ambitious finale that will bring together musical influence across decades in a vivid way. Rather than relying solely on static display, the final section will help audiences see and hear how Black music has travelled through British culture, shaping artists and listeners across generations.  

The Music is Black: A British Story, is the V&A East Museum’s inaugural exhibition and is supported by the Huo Family Foundation with a grant of £125,000.