TransCity

The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, has been awarded 500,000 Euro by the Mondriaan Foundation for a programme on encouraging cultural diversity in modern art. The money will be used to implement their programme Be(com)ing Dutch. The objective of Be(com)ing Dutch is to develop exhibition programmes in close cooperation with artists from African, Asian and South American backgrounds in order to appeal to the various ethnic cultural communities in the Netherlands as an integral part of the museum’s target audiences.

The objective of the Mondriaan Foundation is to encourage the museums in the Netherlands to take cultural diversity more serious. On average, only about 1% of the local visitors of museums of modern art in the Netherlands can be described as having an African, Asian or South American background, while in cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam these communities consist of some 40% of the total population.