V&A receives major grant to launch Research Institute

A generous grant of £1.75M ($2.5M) has been awarded to the V&A,  by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to launch a new V&A Research Institute (VARI). The grant will support a five-year programme of activities that will take the Museum’s thriving research culture into a new phase, making its collections and expertise more visible and connecting them more fully with both academic partners and practitioners of art and design. VARI will host collaborative research and residency projects, expand the Museum’s programme of teaching and training and generate further print and digital publications including a refreshed version of the V&A Online Journal.

The first phase of VARI (2016-21) will focus on a series of projects that are designed to enhance access to key parts of the V&A’s collections, and to help it develop new approaches to storage, display and interpretation. This comes as the Museum continues its ambitious programme of FuturePlan to refresh and redesign its public spaces in South Kensington and plans V&A East in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and new storage facilities in East London.

Initial research projects will include the conservation and digital reproduction of the Leman Album, an 18th-century volume containing the earliest surviving set of European silk designs; a study of the 19th-century legacy of the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ (encyclopaedic collections from Renaissance Europe), and its potential for 21st-century collecting and display; enabling ‘crowdsourced transcriptions’ of some of the V&A’s unparalleled collection of manuscripts by Charles Dickens by making them available online with tools to transcribe the text; and 'Encounters on the Shop Floor,' a project which will bring together practitioners in the arts, humanities, sciences and social sciences to explore making and embodied knowledge.

VARI will also support an augmented programme of residencies to build bridges between South Kensington and East London, a group of fellowships (internal and external, short- and long-term, junior and senior), a series of Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professors and a set of new staff positions including a digital producer and a teaching and training coordinator. These positions will build on the V&A’s unique programme of exhibition research and its world-leading postgraduate programme in the History of Design, run in partnership with the Royal College of Art. Together, these projects and people will enable the Museum’s research activity to be more joined up and more outward facing, and create new opportunities for education and communication across the collections. VARI will also share learning with other institutions by providing resources to help address challenges across the sector such as combining storage with public access; developing standards for describing, preserving and displaying digital collections and integrating the work of practicing designers and artists with traditional academic inquiry.

Director of the V&A, Martin Roth, said: “The V&A was the first museum in the world to establish a dedicated department for research, more than thirty years ago. With the establishment of V&A East in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and the development of new storage and study facilities being planned, this is an incredible opportunity to help reinvent the collections for the digital, democratic age. The new Research Institute will help the Museum to make the most of these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.”

The V&A's Director of Research and Collections, Bill Sherman, said: “VARI will give new life to the Museum’s original mission of using exemplary collections to advance knowledge of the designed world. It will make the objects we house and the expertise we host more accessible to the broadest possible audience. We are grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its extraordinary support and for prompting and shaping our approach.”

The project grows out of a year-long pilot project in 2014-15, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which used the V&A’s textile and fashion collections as a testing ground for museumbased, object-led research. The programme set out to foster new forms of collaboration between experts in curation, conservation and collections management; academics from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences; artists, designers and performers; and pioneers in the field of research administration.