“David Bowie Is” — The First Major Exhibit Dedicated to Bowie Spans 50 Years & Features 300 Great Objects

Atten­tion David Bowie fans: If you’re going to be in Toron­to between now and Novem­ber 27th, you’re in for quite a treat. AGO, the Art Gallery of Ontario, just opened the exhib­it “David Bowie Is,” a huge­ly com­pre­hen­sive mul­ti­me­dia show “Span­ning five decades and fea­tur­ing more than 300 objects from Bowie’s per­son­al archive,” includ­ing hand­writ­ten lyrics, instru­ments, pho­tos like that of Bowie and William Bur­roughs below, and lots and lots of cos­tumes like the body­suit at the bot­tom. Orig­i­nat­ing at London’s Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, this is the first inter­na­tion­al exhib­it sole­ly devot­ed to Bowie.

If you can’t make it to the show, you can see a brief pre­view here and at AGO’s own site. In the short video at the top, Cura­tor Vic­to­ria Broack­es describes the title of the exhib­it as “both an unfin­ished sen­tence and a state­ment.” The exhib­it, she says, illus­trates “Bowie’s own belief that we all have with­in us so many dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties, and we should work hard to fig­ure out what they are and bring them out.” It’s dif­fi­cult to imag­ine any­one but Bowie bring­ing out so many unique­ly fas­ci­nat­ing per­son­al­i­ties as he has in one life­time. As Broack­es’ fel­low cura­tor Geof­frey Marsh com­ments, Bowie is “an aston­ish­ing­ly hard work­er” who “per­formed on aver­age once every 11 nights” for 32 years, all while record­ing album after album and becom­ing an inter­na­tion­al movie star. Bowie may inspire, but he also blows most per­form­ers away with his seem­ing­ly end­less sup­plies of cre­ative ener­gy and sin­gle-mind­ed focus.

H/T Ken

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Releas­es Vin­tage Videos of His Great­est Hits from the 1970s and 1980s

David Bowie Recalls the Strange Expe­ri­ence of Invent­ing the Char­ac­ter Zig­gy Star­dust (1977)

David Bowie Cel­e­brates 66th Birth­day with First New Song in a Decade, Plus Vin­tage Videos

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness