Launch Magazine We Are The Collection & Hester Alberdingk Thijm: Ridder in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau!
AkzoNobel Art Foundation celebrates jubilee with launch of 420-page magazine! During the launch, Deputy Mayor Marjolein Moorman appointed Hester Alberdingk Thijm a Knight in the Order of Oranje-Nassau for her significant and long-standing support for contemporary Dutch art.
The AkzoNobel Art Foundation has been collecting art for 25 years, and the international treasure-trove of artworks and stories contained within has been compiled in a tremendous jubilee magazine, designed by Kummer & Herrman. On the 17th of September, Hester Alberdingk Thijm, director of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, presented the magazine WE ARE THE COLLECTION to Rein Wolfs, director of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and to Art Foundation board members Thierry Vanlancker (CEO AkzoNobel) and Isabelle Deschamps (General Council AkzoNobel).
The launch took place in the Kromhouthal and was viewable online via Livestream:
“One often reads how plants will flourish when spoken or whispered to, coming to bloom far better. The same can be said for any work of art: it needs attention. A collection unseen grows pallid.” — Hanne Hagenaars
Kicking off its jubilee year, the AkzoNobel Art Foundation’s WE ARE THE COLLECTION is a bounteous magazine casting the corporate collection in an entirely new light. She turns her gaze outwards and asks herself: who and what makes a collection?
Artists, curators, photographers, art critics, writers and members of the board such as Thierry Vanlancker, Anna Tilroe, Dirk van Weelden, Niña Weijers, Lex ter Braak, Otobong Nkanga, Isaac Julien and many others reflect on the power a collection holds and the themes she’s inextricably bound up with – beauty, zeitgeist, inclusivity, and the importance of art in our work and our lives. The WE in WE ARE THE COLLECTION can be heard sounding throughout in its varied tones.
This jubilee publication’s written pieces lie nestled in a painstakingly composed cross-section of works from the collection which have largely been rendered full-page. Fine art is quintessentially a personal and often a physical experience. The catalog, in the guise of a colorful magazine, offers the AkzoNobel Art Foundation the chance to take the collection to the reader. Far from being a static tome, it’s a dynamic collection you can take hold of and open to any page, like a wieldy exhibition.
WE ARE THE COLLECTION is accessible without shying away from complex and current issues. Art of any worth is always multi-layered art. Longer essays take turns with short stories, columns, interviews, themed sections, and spreads created especially for this magazine by artists in the collection. In the spread ‘Maximum Crisis, Maximum Calm’ winner of the Prix de Rome, Rory Pilgrim, focuses in on young climate activists, while Patricia Kaersenhout shares a recipe for connection in her spread ‘In the Spirit of X’.
In the section ‘A brief chat with’, Zanele Muholi speaks about her fight for equal rights for LHBTQI people in South Africa, and in ‘Talents/Heroes’ painter Esiri Erheriene-Essi tells us why, among all the works in the collection, ‘Memento’ by Kerry James Marshall – an ode to important African American civil rights activists – is the work that left the greatest impression. Taking the shape of an essay, curator Imara Limon curates her own exhibition with works from the collection, focusing on the artworks’ changing meaning in an inclusive art climate. In ‘Fifty Percent Art and Fifty Percent Women’, Hanne Hagenaars explains why it should by no means be taken for granted that half the works in the AkzoNobel collection are by female artists.
It’s not only the stories told and the artworks shown which bear diversity; it’s the audience the AkzoNobel Art Foundation reaches too. Or as trend watcher Farid Tabarki so succinctly puts it in his column bearing the same name, ‘A good collector is a good connector’. That’s the conviction underlying it all. Collaboration is the greatest appreciation of our human diversity and wealth of ideas – the foundation.
