When the Victoria and Albert Museum’s newest branch, known as the V&A East, opens in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London next month, visitors will be greeted by a monumental sculpture by the London-based artist Thomas J Price. A Place Beyond, an 18-foot-tall bronze figure, stands to the left of the museum entrance and is Price’s tallest sculpture to date.
Like many of Price’s most well-known pieces, A Place Beyond depicts a young Black person in casual, contemporary dress. She is holding a cell phone—also a recurring attribute in Price’s work—and calmly looking out into the distance, her face coolly vacant, her pose almost regal. According to a statement from the museum, the woman in Price’s sculpture was “created from an amalgamation of images, 3D scans and observations,” rather than depicting a specific individual.
“This commission is especially meaningful to me as I was taken to the V&A as a child with my mother and it has shaped much of my critique of museum collections,” Price said in the statement. “I’m excited to be part of the next chapter in the V&A’s evolution in east London.”
Price’s work has been exhibited in museums and outdoor public places around the world, from Sydney, Australia, to Florence, Italy, to Reno, Nevada. In the summer of 2025, his 12-foot-tall sculpture Grounded in the Stars, installed in New York’s Times Square for six weeks, was the subject of viral social media posts, many of which were overtly racist.
The online and in-person responses, wrote ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger at the time, “suggest that Grounded in the Stars has struck a nerve with a certain slice of the public that would rather not see monuments such as this one. That is a deeply unnerving and deeply flawed position.”
Smaller versions of both A Place Beyond and Grounded in the Stars were included in Price’s show “Beyond Measure” at Hauser & Wirth’s downtown Los Angeles gallery in 2023.
