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The Sandberg Instituut houses the master’s degree programmes of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. It is named after Willem Sandberg, former director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, designer and charismatic innovator in the arts. The institute was founded in 1990, on the initiative of Simon den Hartog, then director of the Rietveld, and initially focused primarily on organizing graduate-level activities, such as seminars, workshops and exhibitions. It was the Sandberg’s first director, Jos Houweling, who developed it further into a fully-fledged graduate institute with several different and renowned master’s programmes. Jurgen Bey has been director since 2010. He wants to focus the institute more on the outside world and strengthen its position within the practices of international visual arts and design, initiating new temporary research programmes that connect to urgent issues in art and society.

The Sandberg Instituut is accredited to award MFA, MDes and MIA degrees. It offers four major directions, each with about 20 students: Fine Arts, Applied Arts (known as the Dirty Art Department), Design (the Think Tank for Visual Strategies) and Interior Architecture (the Studio for Immediate Spaces). All of these programmes are relatively autonomous and run by a department head who is also very active as an artist, designer or curator. Almost everyone who works at the Sandberg Institute has a double professional practice. Each programme is supported by a coordinator and usually a small group of renowned artists, writers, designers and/or curators as permanent tutors. There is also a continual coming and going of guest lecturers from the Netherlands and beyond.

Each year, new temporary programmes are initiated, positioned amongst these principal directions. In September of 2011, the Sandberg began one such programme: Vacant NL, which focused on ‘empty buildings’ from the perspective of architectural disciplines. This programme will come to a close in 2013 and will be replaced by two new programmes: Art and Learning (School of Missing Studies) and Material Utopias. The latter will be carried out in close collaboration with the Rietveld undergraduate programmes in ceramics and glass.

The Department of Fine Arts, with which I am affiliated, has since the beginning been the most prominent presence at the Sandberg Institute, primarily thanks to the dual function that Jos Houweling served as department head and director of the institute itself. On the initiative of Jurgen Bey, it has been possible to restructure the Fine Arts Department in light of all that has been achieved during the last 20 years. The department has maintained its focus on such concepts as ‘autonomy’ and ‘making’, but concentrates primarily on what social and economic role and meaning these concepts have within the traditional parameters of the production of art. Here, one does not refer directly to a specific medium, but to such basic forms as language, image, object and movement. These forms are accentuated in the structure of the programme, so that department heads can develop a temporary curriculum for each, and in this way maintain a tailor-made form of higher education. These models are currently being developed by Nicoline van Harskamp, Raimundas Malasauskas and Jason Dodge.

The programme offers a constructive pallet, specifically aimed at the promotion of individual practice. In so doing, it relates to (collective) educational experiments. Each year is different, depending on the kinds of students working in the department. The Fine Arts Department does not train artists, but welcomes individuals who seek a challenge in order to deepen their existing practice. Their diverse backgrounds and experiences (from dance, choreography and music to visual art) generate a strong dynamic within the department, which in turn forms the heart of the programme.

The Sandberg Institute occupies the top three floors of the new Gerrit Rietveld Academy building on the Frederik Roeskestraat in Amsterdam. Students share a common working space. Some programmes are able to offer individual workspaces for given periods. Students have access to the building 24 hours a day and, by appointment, can make use of the various workshop facilities of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.

Candidates for the master’s programmes of the Sandberg Institute can upload their application on the website: www.sandberg.nl. An initial selection will then be made and candidates will be invited for a series of interviews. Applications will be accepted through April 1, 2013. For more information, see www.sandberg.nl

Krist Gruijthuijsen

Course director Fine Arts Department

Translated by Mari Shields