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First Aboriginal Art Museum in Europe

Annette van Ham

31 May 2004 - Annette van Ham is the curator and education officer at the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, Holland, since December 2000. And when she touched base with Arts Hub, looking to tell the story of how a very Australian Art museum is flying the flag of Indigenous Australian art and culture with great success on the other side of the world – this was clearly a story worth telling.

The Aboriginal Art Museum is the first and so far only museum specifically for Aboriginal art in Europe, and funnily enough it is situated in a small town – Utrecht – in a small northern country – The Netherlands. This story began in 1994 – with a Dutch import company for Aboriginal art, which bought Aboriginal art directly at the many art centres in the desert and in Arnhem Land. However conscience and culture started doing battle with profit, because the owners of the company kept discovering artworks they felt should not be sold. So instead they started collecting these pieces. And after a while they realized that the contemporary Aboriginal art they were collecting was hardly represented in any Dutch or European museum collection across the continent. If there was any representation at all, it was in ethnographic museums and not in art museums. Aboriginal art was considered either ethnographic or folk-art, or an inauthentic and commercial play-off of traditional Aboriginal culture. The idea of setting up a museum for Aboriginal art, which is in fact a remarkable new art form that has emerged from the contact between two civilizations, was born.

The foundation Aboriginal Art Museum was raised with the help of other Dutch collectors and interested parties. They put forward the financial means for the realization of the museum, and a suitable building was found in the centre of the city of Utrecht, one of Holland’s old cities in the middle of the country. Utrecht does not have an important ethnographical museum like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, so non-western art is difficult to see and experience in this city. The Aboriginal Art Museum, which opened in March 2001 has been a wonderful addition to the existing range of museums in this town.

The board of the museum currently consists of six people, including one of the original founders and a former director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. We work with a staff of seven people who all have part-time positions. A changing group of about thirty volunteers and fifteen volunteer guides further support the organisation. For education and marketing we usually have one or two interns who assist the staff and learn about the museum profession. Funding for the museum has so far been from private means, but we are seeking long-term sponsorship and government support. The museum is slowly but surely proving that Aboriginal art is an important and exciting art form that needs a serious, dedicated platform in Europe, and this is the basis on which we think additional funding will be found.

Each year, either the director of the museum or myself, as curator, visit the Australian state galleries and museums as well as one or two of the remote art centres. In this way we keep in touch with the all-important Australian network and with the latest developments. And in July this year, I will be visiting Queensland and Alice Springs, as well as the art centres at Yuendumu and Mount Liebig.

The museum has a collection of about 500 works, mainly from the desert and Arnhem Land, but also from the Tiwi Islands and the Kimberley region. The collection is obviously limited in its scope: it was bought between 1994 and 1999, and not with the idea of a museum collection in mind. But it is a good basis to begin work with. At this point in time, we have no budget to acquire new works.

That is why we were very fortunate indeed, when in 2002 an renowned Dutch collector of Aboriginal art decided to give his entire collection on loan to the museum. His very generous move has tripled the collection and has broadened the range of works readily available for exhibition considerably. In addition, the museum works with loans from public and private collections in Europe, America and Australia. We also loan works from our collection to other museums, for example to the Musee d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amérindiens in Marseille, France, where an exhibition of art from Balgo Hills will open on 4 June 2004.

The Aboriginal Art Museum presents two to three changing exhibitions a year. We do not have any permanent displays. In 2002 we hosted the private collection desert paintings of Melbourne gallery owner Gabrielle Pizzi. Maningrida Arts & Culture has lent us a series of prints for an Arnhem Land exhibition and from the Holmes à Court Collection we borrowed the beautiful silk batiks from Utopia in 2003. We currently show photographs of urban based artists like Fiona Foley, Brenda Croft and Michael Riley in the exhibition IMAGES. These works are all on loan from the artists or their representing galleries.

Our exhibitions are supported by educational programs. We show films in our auditorium and have an extensive reading table on the ground floor. Visitors can book a guided tour or individually join one every Sunday afternoon. We receive school groups with a special children’s program and organise summer activities for individual children. With each exhibition an educational booklet for individual children is developed. For the current exhibition IMAGES we have developed a specific high school program for the first time.

The museum has about 25,000 visitors each year. We find that the public reacts very positively to the work we present and that our exhibitions make it clear that Aboriginal art is a highly exciting contemporary art. In general people do however come in to the museum with other expectations. Crudely put: if they know anything about Aboriginal culture at all, it is limited to the notion that it is primitive; that Aboriginal people are to be pitied because they are repressed; or they have read the popular book Mutant Message Down Under’ by Marlo Morgan and think of Aboriginal people as wise noble savages. Our exhibitions present a different, more realistic perspective and we consider the educational programs a very important goal of the museum. Dutch and European press reactions to our exhibitions are usually positive but descriptive rather than deconstructive. Because journalists still know so little about Aboriginal art, critical discourse on our exhibitions and the position the museum takes, is very rare. But we are optimistic for the future.

To find out more about the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, Holland visit:
www.aamu.nl.

Annette van Ham
Annette van Ham is an art historian. She first became interested in Aboriginal art while preparing for her internship at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane in 1991. After her work at the QAG, she had the chance to go on tour throughout Queensland with the Flying School of the Arts, and to work in the Devenport Gallery and Arts Centre in Devenport, Tasmania. She then went to the NT for a stint as cook on a large cattlestation. After her return to Holland in 1992, she managed a small commercial Aboriginal art gallery in Rotterdam, to come back to Australia to do her Master’s Degree at James Cook University in Townsville in 1994. As board member of the INMA foundation for the promotion of Aboriginal art in Europe, she was involved in organising the exhibition ‘Desert Tracks, Aboriginal art from the heart of Australia’ in Amsterdam and Antwerp and the publication of the Dutch book with the same title in 1995. From 1996 to 2000 she gave lectures on Aboriginal art in The Netherlands and Belgium, wrote several articles on the subject and traveled to Australia whenever the possibility arose. At the end of 2000, she was appointed curator and education officer of the new Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht.
a.vanham@aamu.nl

Source: Arts Hub Australia

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