V&A announces major autumn show: Records and Rebels 1966-70

This September the V&A museum in London will launch a major exhibition exploring the era-defining significance and impact of the late 1960’s on life today. The show, You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-70, will focus on five years at the end of decade covering topics ranging from civil rights, multiculturalism, environmentalism, consumerism, computing to communality and neoliberalist politics.

On display will be more than 350 artefacts spanning photography, posters, literature, music, design, fashion and performance to convey the ideals and ethos of a youth culture that embraced optimistic idealism, questioned existing power structures and whose actions resonate in the way we live today.

Highlights on display will show the creative, social and legal outputs of revolutionary new ways of living. They will include underground magazines from Oz to the International Times; a shopping list written behind barricades during the 1968 Paris student riots; a moon rock on loan from NASA alongside the space suit worn by William Anders, who took the defining Earthrise photograph on the Apollo 8 mission; a rare Apple 1 computer; an Ossie Clark costume for Mick Jagger; original artworks by Richard Hamilton; shards from Jimi Hendrix’s guitar; the suits worn by John Lennon and George Harrison on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and handwritten lyrics for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles.

Martin Roth, director of the V&A, says: “This ambitious framing of late 1960s counterculture shows the incredible importance of that revolutionary period to our lives today. This seminal exhibition will shed new light on the wide-reaching social, cultural and intellectual changes of the late 1960s which followed the austerity of the post-war years, not just in the UK but throughout the Western world. Our collections at the V&A, unrivalled in their scope and diversity, make us uniquely placed to present this exhibition.”