A Thomas J Price Bronze Opens Door to London’s V&A East

In front of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new outpost in East London stands an 18-foot figure, cast in bronze. In contrast to the carved statues of monarchs and saints framing the entrance to the museum’s main building eight miles to the west, this towering sculpture depicts an anonymous young Black woman.

She holds a phone in one hand as she turns, in a twist reminiscent of Bernini’s “David,” to look over her right shoulder with an intent gaze. Her hair is in two neat braids and the folds of her T-shirt drape luxuriously where they tuck into her jeans. She wears colossal Nike Air Rift sneakers.

The sculpture, “A Place Beyond” by the British artist Thomas J Price, is intended as “a sort of reverse lighthouse” to welcome visitors to the newly opened V&A East Museum, said Gus Casely-Hayford, its director.

On the bank of a canal just a few minutes’ walk from the recently opened V&A East Storehouse, the museum is geared toward young people and features items from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection that address subjects including identity, creativity and sustainability.

Casely-Hayford said he had talked to students at more than 100 local schools to shape this approach to the new museum, which opens Saturday. He hoped that young people from the diverse neighborhoods around East London would see something of themselves in “A Place Beyond,” and feel welcome, he said.

Arts institutions sometimes seem like they “forget about the sorts of people who sit on the margins,” Casely-Hayford said, but at V&A East, he was “thinking about how to tell those stories.”

For more than two decades, Price, 44, has engaged with similar ideas through public sculpture — including with “A Place Beyond,” his largest work to date.

In an interview, Price’s said he was trying to undermine “the expectations of what art with a capital ‘A’ is supposed to do” by depicting fictional Black people at heroic scale in unheroic poses. If they are clothed, it’s in casual dress, and they have bodies shaped like many regular Britons or Americans.

Price said a public sculpture’s installation, for him, was just the “starting line.” Then, he added, the public’s response reveals how “we discover ourselves, we see ourselves.”

The public response can be explosive.

Last April, when “Grounded in the Stars,” a 12-foot work by Price depicting a Black woman in a casual pose, was installed in Times Square, it set off a national, and sometimes racist, debate. Some commenters on social media made A.I. animations of racist tropes referencing the sculpture. When it was featured on Fox News, a host branded the work “a D.E.I. statue.”

Those responses upset Price less, he said, than “the messages I would get from women who look like her, saying she was disgusting.” He added that those showed how pervasive “bigoted views, also hugely, hugely entrenched in body shaming,” had become.

But he added that those made up a tiny minority of the responses he got from Black Americans, most of which were positive.

In Britain, there has also been discussion about who should be represented by public art. Numerous statues celebrating Black Britons have been erected in recent years, but research by the cultural education charity Art U.K. shows that still only 2 percent of public statues celebrate people of color, and more than three quarters of them depict men.

Price studied at the Royal College of Art, where he also specialized in performance art and animation. When it came to working in sculpture, he chose figuration as “a conscious strategy to really encourage people to engage,” he said, because everyone has an idea of what a person looks like.

“A lot of people, they’re not used to seeing people who look like them,” Price said. “And I mean that not just in terms of race or gender, but people just being people.”

According to the writer and curator Ekow Eshun, in this “incredibly divisive time” of culture wars, some people have the sense that a statue of a Black person “needs to be affirmative and positive,” and that any other depiction is “somehow letting down the possibility of uplifting Blackness.”

But Price “doesn’t tell you what to think,” Eshun said. Instead, the artist leaves “space for viewers and onlookers to form their own relationship with those figures,” Eshun added.

As the furor in the United States last year showed, that relationship is inevitably shaped by wider social and racial fault lines. The backlash to the deliberately unassuming Black figure in Times Square reminded Eshun, he said, of how the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was treated by some “as inevitably controversial, when actually as a proposition, it’s the simplest thing of all to say that the lives of Black people are also worth attending to.”

By focusing on what Eshun called the “felt experience of Black life,” Price includes some of his own. He grew up in Brixton, a once predominantly Black neighborhood in South London, and attended private school in a more affluent part of town. In both environments, “I was told I was either too much like this,” Price said, “or too much like that,” because of his clothes or his accent.

“I’ve lived my life having to smile, and having to prove that I’m not a threat in certain circumstances,” he said, adding he became “constantly conscious of my own expression.” (“I still do it today,” Price said, “and if I’m doing it, I cannot be the only one.”)

But the characters in his sculptures, which are partly based on real people Price captures using 3-D scanning, are “rebellious,” the artist said, because they “refuse to be performative, in any direction.”

The new sculpture in front of V&A East Museum is typical of this refusal, capturing the young woman in an unguarded and intimate moment. In her ambiguous gaze, the viewer could find curiosity, preoccupation or hope.

What is clear is that she is not burdened by the self-consciousness that helps Price move safely through the world. “For me, that’s always been the massive goal,” he said, “to not have to conform to anybody else’s vision of what acceptance looks like.”