I enrolled in a course offered by the Van Gogh museum in 2016- 2017: the Art of Making Art Exhibitions. The course was supervised by  Edwin Becker, chief curator of exhibitions at the Van Gogh Museum and Els Reijnders, free-lance curator. 

We explored the inner workings of museums, artists’ initiatives, galleries and granting organisations. Conversations with experts  shed light on the motivations and profile of the contemporary curator. We had meetings with specialists in communication, design, financial management, fundraising and organisation. All in all – packed with interesting stuff! 

We paid weekly visits to exhibitions all over the Netherlands – so great to be allowed to peek behind the scene! At the same time we developed and mounted an exhibition, a challenge meant to test our mastery of the subject. This exhibition took place in The Mesdag Collection in The Hague.

For the exhibition, we decided to contrast art made by young people at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague with paintings from the ‘The Hague School. Painters who took the newly invented paint tubes outside and painted the Dutch landscape as-was, that is: without a lot of romantic embellishments like mountains and golden rays of sun and bloodcurdling dawns. At the time, this was a new and revolutionary idea, powerful enough to have one’s paintings banned from polite society. Then they were discovered, canonised, then they fell from grace, and nowadays we’re re-discovering them: full circle.