The Grammy Museum are opening up an exhibition of the five-time Grammy Award winning artist Amy Winehouse to celebrate her creativity and style.
Winehouse, who only released two albums before her untimely death at her Camden Town house in July 2011, became a breakout artist worldwide with her unique look, her headline grabbing behavior and her jazz-infused music, including “Rehab” and “Back to Black”.
The exhibition “Beyond Black – The Style of Amy Winehouse’ focuses on her outfits and accessories, as well as her hand-written song lyrics and pages of her diaries.
“When you look at the content of this exhibition and what we really wanted to highlight here is you see her creativity,” said Nicholas Vega, the director of curatorial affairs for the Grammy Museum.
He added “The lyrics that she wrote really had depth to them and were based on her own personal experiences. Her style that she created was intentional. She appreciated certain styles of years past and she was able to take pin up styles of the 40s, for example, and bring it into the Camden neighborhood that she lived in the 2000s.”
One of the most unique items in the exhibition is Winehouse’s “Fame Ambitions” list that she wrote as a teenager.
Included on the list are ambitions to be a film actress, to have people look up to her, to not have surgery and to buy a house in South Beach, as well as celebrities she wanted to meet and get personal with.
Vega said “They really speak to her intensity to be so focused at an early age and even when you look at some of her journal entries that we have, her daily journal entries that we have facsimiles of that are on display here, you can see that it was practice guitar, it was written for ‘x’ amount of times, it was meet with management so she was very dedicated to her craft.”
The exhibition also features one of Winehouse’s notes and sketches about one of her little known ambitions.
“Amy had this idea at a young age that if she wasn’t going to be a singer, she wanted to open up a diner, you know, a restaurant, where servers, waitresses, in particular, would be rolling around on their roller-skates,” said Vega.
“She also took it so far she went ahead and wrote a song about it – Dolly’s Diner and then she had sketches of this is what the waitresses’ uniforms would look like. Again I think it speaks to how focused she was as an artist but also as an individual,” he added.
The exhibition opened on Friday (January 17) and will run through to April 13.
