The Design Museum is London’s New Hot Spot for Skating!
The Design Museum has just opened its new exhibition and it is dedicated to… skateboarding. SKATEBOARD is the first major exhibition in the UK to map the evolution of skateboard design from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition covers the story of skateboard design, skating performance and skaters’ communities progressing in the course of the last 70 years when skating has existed as a sports activity.
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The exhibition includes a skating ramp and offers visitors with various levels of experience the incredible opportunity to skate inside the central London museum. Although nowadays it is quite common for museums to allow visitors, especially the younger ones, to try the exhibiting product, Design Museum has taken this practice a step further by giving its visitors a chance to physically become a part of the exhibition in getting on the ramp and showing off a few tricks to the public.
Curated and designed by the author, designer and skater Jonathan Olivares, this will be the first exhibition in the UK to explore the evolution of skateboard design in such detail. The project has been developed in partnership with Converse. The exhibition features around 100 rare and unique skating boards, alongside more than 150 other objects such as wheels and trucks, and safety equipment, also including VHS tapes, DVDs and magazines covering the history of skateboarding,
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Visitors will have a chance to explore a variety of skating relics that reflect the skateboard’s evolution in societal perception. It evolves from being the Easy Rider for people who can’t afford motorbikes to an Olympic sport. The exhibition will feature a range of contemporary boards alongside the skateboards homemade in California in the 1950s. Laura Thornhill’s Logan Earth Ski 1970s pro model, Tony Hawk’s first ever professional model skateboard, Sky Brown’s first pro model and the Sky Brown x Skateistan Almost deck are particularly worthy of attention.
Although skating may seem like a fairly young sport, it actually has been around for ages and by now has built a solid reputation. Often associated with a pastime activity for rebellious teenagers on city streets, it has managed to build up a counterculture of its own. And just like any other youth-driven subculture it has frequently been appearing in pop culture magazines and various films. However, despite the fact that skateboarding has gained a popular acclaim over the past few years, it is still unknown who its real creator is.
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The exhibition will not give an answer to this question either. Still, it sheds light on the tremendous cultural impact on modern society that skateboarding has made. Already marked as a raging success, SKATEBOARD is a definite must-see (and a must-try-skating) exhibition that will leave you deeply fascinated with this ‘cool kids’ sport.
The exhibition runs at the Design Museum from October 20, 2023 through June 2, 2024.
