Do I want to, can I, or should I reconsider my judgement on diversity in the art world?

Introduction

In my previous blog post, ‘Why an open cultural sector is still a myth’, I took a fierce stance against institutional racism and the insular nature of the art world. As an art ‘lover’, and emphatically not a true ‘connoisseur’, I observe things from the sidelines—through courses, reviews, books, and exhibitions. I am an ‘outsider’, and perhaps my immediate reactions can sometimes be a bit too knee-jerk

Everybody hates quotas

Shortly after publishing my post, I came across an article in the NRC newspaper: ‘After five years, the Stedelijk can say: the collection has become more diverse. But is a quota the best way?’ The piece referenced a symposium held in September 2026 by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and a quantitative study titled ‘Everybody hates quotas‘, published in Szine magazine #4 2026. At the time, the Stedelijk Museum was the first art institution in the Netherlands to step forward with a firm commitment to diversifying its programming. To force the issue, they introduced a quota. What did that mean in practice?

In 2020, they decided that, for a four-year period, at least 50 percent of the acquisition budget had to be spent on artists born outside Western Europe and North America, and/or who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color).

The inevitable debate erupted: from that point on, was it still about the quality of the artwork, or purely about the artist’s background? Regardless, the Stedelijk wanted to make a radical catch-up effort and deployed this drastic measure.

The result

On paper, the results were impressive: no less than 72% of the total budget (over 7.5 million euros, largely from private funds) was spent within the quota. Something to celebrate grandly, you might think. But when I looked a little closer, it turned out that 46% of this budget was spent on the work of a select group of internationally established BIPOC ‘superstars’,  such as Rashid Johnson, El Anatsui, and Patricia Kaersenhout.

Why? Because the Stedelijk Museum is wrestling with its own history. A massive part of its permanent collection consists of monumental canvases from the white, male canon of the 1960s and 1970s. To physically break that historical power structure in the galleries, the museum now buys equally monumental installations that can hold their own alongside them. Private donors play a role too: they simply tend to attach their money to established names whose status is beyond question.

Younger artists

Fortunately, the Stedelijk has a modest, internal budget of €100,000 specifically allocated to young artists under the age of 35. Within that group, 80% falls within the quota. Here, the museum attempts to use its institutional weight to offer a platform to young talent. Important themes within this segment include ‘in-betweenness’ (the creative intermediate zone) and collective practice (artists working from a deep connection to their local community). However, the study also exposed a shadow side: it is now young, white, male artists who barely feature in the programming and receive virtually no funding.

The Stedelijk Museum versus Kunstinstituut Melly

Overturning cultural policy is not so much a matter of unwillingness, but rather of the structural limitations of the type of institution. In my previous blog, I promised to write about the exhibition of South African artist Moshekwa Langa in Rotterdam. But before I dive into his work, it is important to understand why the very place where he exhibits is so crucial to the entire diversity debate.

There is a deep divide between an institution like the Stedelijk Museum and a space like Kunstinstituut Melly. The crucial difference lies at the very core of what they are: the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is an institution that guards and collects the canon, whereas Kunstinstituut Melly is an art house focused on process and on questioning those very same structures. While the Stedelijk attempts to rectify a historical legacy within a traditional museum model, Melly has dismantled its own foundations to make room for co-creation and collective learning.

The Stedelijk Museum carries the heavy burden of a historical collection of 90,000 objects and must try to repair history after the fact with massive financial injections and quotas—trapped by the laws of the major art market and private donors.

Melly is of a different order: it is a dynamic meeting place without a permanent collection, and thus without that historical baggage. Since its radical transformation in 2021, the focus has been entirely on decolonization, public engagement, and collective learning.

Its objective is to be an open space where societal questions are asked and where the hierarchy between the ‘connoisseur’ and the public completely blurs. The Stedelijk Museum tries to repair the existing system; Melly redefines it from the ground up.

Moshekwa Langa in Rotterdam

Moshekwa Langa has lived and worked in the Netherlands for more than 25 years. In the run-up to this exhibition, he shared that although his work is recognized worldwide, he often feels ‘invisible’ in his adopted home country.

In an interview with the NRC, he noted: ‘Everyone sees you, looks at you, but they also look right past you.’

This presents a painful paradox. Anyone diving into the storage depots of major Dutch institutions will find that Langa is far from absent. As early as 1998, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired his flag installation Dor, and more recently, the Kunstmuseum Den Haag purchased his monumental floor installation Mogalakwena.

The physical objects exist within the institutional archives. Yet, actually claiming physical gallery space—the opportunity to let an entire life’s work breathe across four floors—remained out of reach. It proves that acquisition policies and genuine public visibility are two completely different things.

With that fundamental difference in mind, I looked with completely different eyes at the large retrospective exhibition ‘You will find us in the best places’  by Moshekwa Langa, which opened last Saturday at Kunstinstituut Melly.

Who is Moshekwa Langa?

He was born in 1975 in Bakenberg, a village in the northern Limpopo province of South Africa. He is no novice waiting to be discovered. He broke through internationally in the mid-1990s as one of the first young Black artists after the fall of apartheid.

His work is held by world-renowned institutions such as MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London, and he has participated in the Venice and São Paulo Biennials. As a multidisciplinary artist, he refuses to be pigeonholed.

He creates massive installations, collages, and videos from everyday, found materials: from maps and plastic bags to coffee grounds, newspaper clippings, and string.

His style is poetic, layered, and rebellious. He investigates themes of displacement and identity by directing his gaze almost like an anthropologist toward his own life and birthplace. A well-known example is his fascination with redrawing maps—which arose because his home village was literally omitted from official maps during apartheid. But Langa does not just redraw geopolitical borders; his mixed-media collages, videos, and photographic portraits of the village residents together form an alternative, deeply personal map of emotions and memories.

While he has enjoyed worldwide recognition for decades, it remained remarkably quiet in his home base of the Netherlands.

The exhibition at Melly, which spans all four floors of the building, is his first truly major retrospective here.

As an art house, Melly has no permanent collection. It does not have to prove that an acquisition is ‘grand and impressive enough’ to hang alongside the old, white guard (as the Stedelijk Museum must). This gives Langa complete freedom to seek out that elusive, ‘liminal’ zone in which he loves to operate: the twilight zone between harsh reality and the dream world, the point at which you try to make sense of the world around you.

His layered art at Melly is not a way to check a box or a statistic in a diversity report. It transcends the rigid policy rules that large museums struggle with so much. It is precisely in this searching, friction-filled space that Langa’s work gains the significance it deserves.

Under the leadership of director Gabi Ngcobo, Melly proves that true openness is not about multi-million budgets, but about the courage to look critically at oneself and truly provide a stage for others.

What I have learned while writing this blog is that in my reflections, I need to take more into account what the specific objective of the museum, the institution, or the platform is. An institutional course correction is simply a more complex process for a historical institution than for a young, flexible organization. Rigid quotas and massive budgets cannot simply wipe away historical baggage.

Fortunately, in the Netherlands—and certainly also in my own city of Rotterdam—there are more and more (art)initiatives showing what organic diversity and multiculturalism look like when you truly give them space from the ground up. Kunstinstituut Melly proves that openness is not a matter of repairing things after the fact, but of having the courage to throw the doors wide open right from the start.

Next time, I’ll be exploring again the world of graffiti and street art.

Johanna