Alexandra van Dongen

Alexandra van Dongen (1961), studied museology and art history in Leiden. In 1986, she started her career at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, where she became curator of historic design in 1992. Alexandra has organized many exhibitions and collection presentations since then, and is responsible for several research projects, such as the ALMA Project, which examines depicted material artefacts in visual art. In all of her projects and publications she involves transhistorical and transcultural perspectives, building bridges between a diversity of artistic and academic disciplines, world art & design history, combining material and immaterial heritage, often in collaboration with contemporary artists. Since 2017 Alexandra combines her part-time job at the museum with freelance projects, exhibitions, research projects and publications. In 2017, she organized the exhibition I cook, therefore I am with guest curator and writer Abdelkader Benali, and in 2018 the exhibition POWERMASK. The Power of Masks with guest curator and fashion designer Walter Van Beirendonck at the Rotterdam Wereldmuseum. In 2020, in collaboration with the performing artist Rajae El Mouhandiz, Alexandra guest curated the exhibition Modest Fashion at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Recently she published a new book called Dichter bij Vincent. Alledaagse voorwerpen in het werk van Vincent van Gogh (Closer to Vincent. Everyday Objects in the work of Vincent van Gogh) and made an exhibition on the subject in the form of an artist installation together with artists André Smits and Monika Dahlberg at the Van GoghHuis in Zundert. Last October her new research project at the Boijmans called Unpacking Boijmans. The Colonial Past and the Collection, can be visited at the Depot. Her last publication is called ‘Jan van Eyck’s Syrian Apothecary Jar: The Earliest Known Depiction of Middle Eastern Ceramics in Medieval European Art’, in: Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700 (eds. Katherine A. Wilson and Leah R. Clark, Liverpool University Press, 2022.

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