Making wall dresses with thousands of people: Community art finds a way to community centers and museums

A sunny Tuesday afternoon, the Oude Kerk in Delft is filled with people. They are not in the pews, but felting, punnikes, embroidery and punching at a long table. The atmosphere is pleasant, there are Thermoskanen coffee and tea on the table. Under the stained glass windows hangs a tapestry of monumental dimensions that slowly starts to take shape.

The tapestry is part of wires of our Dutch slavery past, an art project with which curator Ricardo Burgzorg traces of the provincial slavery history triggers. What started as an assignment from the Groningen churches grew into a national project. He came up with a participatory element to involve the Groningen people in the theme.

In the meantime, more than 3000 people have picked up needle and thread in churches, libraries, former car showrooms, community centers and museums. Their number is still growing, just like the gigantic wall rugs that will eventually connect the provinces.

It is an example of what is called ‘community art’, an art form in which a work is not made by one artist but by a group. It does not matter whether your enthusiast, professional maker or autodidact. In community art, the manufacturing process and the participant are more central. That has a democratizing effect: art becomes less distant and more approachable. Anyone who used to be a spectator now becomes Schepper.

Marjolein Beuling (77) discovered how that worked, as one of the participants in wires of our Dutch slavery past. She read about the textile project in Delft on Sunday and came to see. The coordinators soon noticed how handy she is with the textile, and now she is a fixed pivot in the team in Delft. Beuling monitors the pattern and keeps an overview. Every now and then someone comes to her table to ask what can be done best.

“My husband died in January, he had dementia,” says Beuling. “This gives me something to do, and the theme appeals to me.” Beuling points to the stained glass windows that tell a religious story. The designer of the tapestry has been inspired by this visual narrative shape: the image is made up of color areas that are separated with black edges.

Zoom in

Golden Carriage

The design process was exciting for the Chinese-Malaysian textile artist Kueh (1995). “I didn’t grew up in the Netherlands. Can I make something that reflects on Dutch slavery history?” He wonders when we talk to each other in Delft. The first design he sent in, with the Golden Carriage incorporated in it, was rejected.

Burgzorg: “In principle, all participants must be able to agree with the wall dress design, but of course there is also discussion. In Delft there were ladies who said: Should we still rack that history again? They also asked: why are there no white people in the center of the wall dress?” The wall rugs may yield discussion, says Burgzorg: good community art facilitates those conversations, instead of avoiding them.

Textile lends itself well to community art as a material, says artist Kueh: “Textile is always something that continues several processes, and is therefore often made by several people. Someone picks the cotton, another makes it yarn, it is designed, woven and sewn. It is always a common project.” He describes how in his home country of Malaysia the weaving of textiles was a village ritual for months in which women together spun, washed, painted and gossip.

According to him, the common making process of textile art is at the same time a criticism of the capitalist idea of ​​individual ownership. Kueh mainly links that individual ownership to Western thinking. Against this, the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa also acted, which curated the Documenta 15 in 2022. As a collective curator, Ruangrupa invited collectives from all over the world, especially from the global south. Central was the pre-colonial Lumbung principle, where a village or community harvested together and kept the proceeds in a joint rice shed. Can you also make art, without individual authorship but with the signature of the collective? Following Ruangrupa, De Appel Art Institute in Amsterdam organized a curators program around this creation process, and there is temporarily a two-year Lumbung Practice Master at the Sandberg Institute.

Zoom in

Zoom in

Common -made art sometimes clashes with how the art world is organized. Institutions, lenders and art fairs still lean strongly on the romantic idea of ​​the autonomous genius artist, says Manique Hendricks, curator at the Frans Hals Museum: “I notice that it is still complicated to separate you from that idea, because the art world is still contained in those structures.” She sees that a new generation of artists with shared authorship wants to transcend the structure around the Sterkunstenaar.

Hendricks thinks of the queer club culture, of which she is part of. She co-curted the exhibition in 2024 The art of drag In the Frans Hals Museum. “In the queer club culture everyone is part of the evening. It feels the most on a Gesamtkunstwerk without a hierarchy.”

Purchase together

In addition to curators, it is often artists who challenge institutions with community art. When the work Guess who’s coming to dinner too? Van Patricia Kaersenhout in 2021 was part of an exhibition in the Frans Hals Museum, she stated that work continuously had to be done with local communities. A strong condition, says Hendricks.

It is striking that for the purchase of Kaersenhout’s work, museums were also collaborated. The Frans Hals Museum, Centraal Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Van Abbemuseum are each owner of one of the four tables from which Guess who’s coming to dinner too? exists, which also function separately as fully -fledged artworks.

The Rijksmuseum also had to deal with a wish list when it purchased the model ‘AZC Klompjan in Markelo’ (2012) in 2024. The model was manufactured by Karen Gigiazarian, who lived as an asylum seeker in one of the first large -scale asylum seekers’ shelters in the Netherlands. During his stay, he started to build the entire asylum seekers’ center with waste materials that he found on the site out of stress and boredom.

With the help of Grassroots Collectief stopover, Gigiazarian asked the Rijksmuseum to keep the work accessible to people with an asylum seeker history. Although this work is not made common, it is a work that an underexposed community and perspective raises.

Because the model has a symbolic value for the community, Rijksmuseum curator Harm Stevens thinks it is important to facilitate the accessibility of the work. “That is also the reason why we work with artists: they challenge us as a cultural institution to go outside our comfort zone.”

Of course it sometimes continues to scan when the collaboration between artist and community is really equivalent. “This is one of the reasons why I don’t get back to make a work of art with the women of my village,” says Kueh, who finds it difficult because of a possible exploitation or unequal relationship.

Discomfort

Perhaps the most famous community art project of an artist who has never shunned the inconvenience is White Cube by the Dutchman Renzo Martens. In 2017, the Western artist helped with the founding of the Congolese collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolais (CatPC). It consists of former plantation workers from Unilever in Congo. They make and sell art to buy back land with this income and to plant an ecological food forest for the community.

In the Netherlands, Marcos Kueh sees community art as an answer to contemporary loneliness: “It feels better to be with a group of people, talking, drinking coffee and making things together than being home alone. If we can do something together every day, then it will keep us going.” You can see that sense of community in the Oude Kerk, where local organizers enthusiastically present each other to speak to the reporter.

“With us, the resident is central,” says Nathalie van der Hak of Delft level and Delft Cultuurhuis. These organizations are in ‘attention neighborhoods’, and know how to get communities together and keep them together. Van der Hak: “People really want to belong to something, be seen. They want to be part of a larger whole. Through art and culture we bet on meeting.”

Zoom in

Awareness about a theme such as the slavery past requires time, Burgzorg sees. “The vast majority of people come to help with making the tapestry, not to talk about the slavery history. But if you are going to participate, then of course you also want to know what the design is about. You will think about it, you talk to others about it.”

These examples show that community art asks fundamental questions about who belongs to the group, and which perspectives are part of it. Sometimes those are private places where marginalized groups can be themselves, such as in the queer club culture, and often it also takes place in public places. Here people can meet each other and put their hands to work until the tongues slowly come loose.

The sum is more than its parts. Community art provides a modest place where you will again feel part of a larger whole. That you feel rooted locally, even in the light of the past slavery.

Burgzorg emphasizes that, in addition to cutting a loaded subject, it is also about having fun making the wall dress. That is also what Kueh advocates with his tapestry: “I think that many native Dutch people feel pretty settled and safe in this country. For the descendants of people made to slave, I wish the same thing. That they can feel at home here and simply enjoy their lives.”

Participating in the wires of our Dutch slavery past: until July you can participate in South Holland on the wall dress of Marcos Kueh: in Nest, Library The Hague and Cultural Educational Center Dordrecht. Until December you can cooperate in Gelderland on the wall dress to a design by Richard Kofi. The tapestry of Overijssel can be seen until 24 August in the Academiehuis, Zwolle. The tapestry from Utrecht can be seen until 26 October in Stadsmuseum Veenendaal. For more info, visit dvons.nl

To share





Mail the editors