two-thirds of their studios are closed

Every week, Bor Beekman, Robert van Gijssel, Merlijn Kerkhof, Anna van Leeuwen or Herien Wensink take a stand in the world of film, music, theater or visual arts.

These weeks there are graduation exhibitions all over the country. A great opportunity to see what budding artists are up to. There is also a lot for a graduating art student to worry about. The future, money or the black hole after the academy, for example. Those concerns should have nothing to do with art school. In Den Bosch it is different.

‘I just want the next batch of students to have the same facilities as I have had’, says master’s student Leonie Schepers of the St. Joost art academy, while she finishing touches is doing her graduation presentation. A real funeral meeting was organized on 2 June in the room where she exhibits. Students and teachers had dressed in black to ‘say goodbye to our beloved academy’.

That sounds melodramatic, but their concerns are justified. Avans, the educational organization that St. Joost falls under, has big plans for this building, making the space for art tiny. 600 students from the Business Innovation program will soon be added. About one third of the art places and studio spaces that the academy now has will remain. A third!

The art students rightly do not like that at all. ‘Art and culture are being suppressed, that says something about how policymakers and now even the education sector look at art’, says Irishman Lauren Egan. She came to Den Bosch especially for the master’s degree. Due to the lack of space, the next batch of master’s students will only follow online classes. An abomination, and disastrous for the opportunities to collaborate or create great works of art. Schepers, who graduates with brightly colored wall hangings, says: ‘I really couldn’t have made those at home!’

The art academy is housed in a former PostNL mail sorting hall. In a few years a hip residential area should be built around it and then this building will be called ‘KuBus’, after that bizarre fusion of ‘art & business’. The students who are leaving now will (fortunately) not experience it again.

I call Isa IJpelaar, one of the initiators of the protest. She has just completed her first year and is very concerned about the school: ‘I wonder if it will still be an art academy in the future.’ She herself had chosen the St. Joost (after a photography training in Eindhoven) because students in Den Bosch had their own studio from the second year. Now that she is almost a sophomore herself, a different policy applies. There will be ‘flexible workplaces’. Pretty clumsy, if you’re also making sculptures.

There have already been clashes with business students, she says. For example, they let the art students know that they thought they were weird, comparing them to a ‘circus’ and a ‘zoo’. IJpelaar: ‘I have classmates who were bullied in secondary school. They thought they could finally be themselves at art academy…’

Little has changed after the protest: ‘We talk a lot with the management. Director René Bosma keeps saying that he shares our concerns and that we don’t have to worry, which is quite frustrating.’ She knows that studio space is also under pressure at the art academies in Maastricht, Rotterdam and Utrecht. Anyone who still wants to see ambitious graduates should act quickly.