Lecture “A White House is not a Home?”
In the context of a conference at Leiden University on Museums, Collections and Society Schavemaker gave a talk titled “A White House is not a Home? Critical Reflections on the Rise of the White Cube Model in the Netherlands”
In our current search to come to terms with mechanisms of exclusion and inequities in our modern institutions, Schavemaker discussed in this lecture how a return to the founders and collections of 19th century House Museums and their 20th century afterlife may provide new critical perspectives on the rise of the white cube model and its ideology. The lecture was built upon Schavemaker’s publication The White Cube as Lieu de Mémoire: The Future of History in the Contemporary Art Museum (Reinwardt Memorial Lecture, 2017) and dwelled upon the intricate institutional relationships between the Willet-Holthuysen House, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam Museum and the collections assembled by Sophia Adriana Lopez Suasso-de Bruyn. The recent exhibitions by Maaike Schoorel and ANOHNI at the Willet-Holthuysen House served as ‘theoretical objects’ via which repressed modernist histories could be unpacked and countered.
