Exploring legacy and narrative in star performer popular music exhibitions: The Design Museums’ Amy: Beyond the Stage

Recent years have seen a range of star performer popular music exhibitions about individual musicians or bands in British museums. This article offers a view on how these exhibitions can shape historic narratives about their subjects, influencing their legacies. Drawing on gallery observations and materials collected during multiple site visits, the article presents an analysis of Amy: Beyond the Stage at the Design Museum in London, illustrating some of the challenges faced by contemporary curators when structuring narratives and exhibiting performer legacies in popular music exhibitions, contributing to the increasing body of academic literature designed to critically evaluate practices of curation in popular music museums and exhibitions. By focusing on three themes: single narrative curation, nostalgia and empathy, and canonisation, it argues that, to preserve the public legacies of their subjects, star performer exhibitions sometimes misrepresent or re-write historic events, which can lead to the whitewashing of history.