In the context of our 150 anniversary we’ve been looking at the imprint that the Rijksakademie has had on the city of Amsterdam.

This summer, with the city map ‘150 years of Rijksakademie on the map’ in your hand, you can wander through the streets and parks of the city in search of Rijksakademie history. After months of research – partly thanks to your help – we have 'mapped' 450 works in the public space by artists who have been affiliated with the Rijksakademie for the past 150 years – from former directors and teachers to advisors and alumni. Works by Jan Toorop, Hildo Krop, Constance Wibaut, Constant, Karel Appel and Jan Wolkers, but also by the contemporary generation of Rijksakademie alumni, such as Jennifer Tee, Amalia Pica, Papa Adama and Dan Walwin. We invited Hans Aarsman, in his inimitable style, to investigate the finds in detail and to map out a number of thematic paths. This has resulted in a podcast that will lead you along ten works throughout the city, which will be available along with the city map. For the design of this extensive project we went to Studio Joost Grootens, specialised in the design of books in the field of architecture, urban space and art, and of atlases in particular.

To give an idea of the diversity of the artworks that can be found on the map, we will regularly highlight some of them here. Today work by Frans Stracké, Gerda Rubinstein and Jennifer Tee.

The oldest statue on the map dates from 1862 and can be found at cemetery De Nieuwe Ooster. It is the funeral monument of painter Jan Willem Pieneman (1779-1853), who was director of the Royal Academy of Visual Arts, predecessor of the Rijksakademie, from 1820 until his death. His funeral monument was made by sculptor Frans Stracké (1820-1898), born in the year that Pieneman was appointed the first director of the Royal Academy. In 1868 he was appointed professor there himself. Stracké came from a real sculptor's family. His father, the German painter and sculptor Ignatius Stracké, had taught him the trade in his Berlin studio. Frans Stracké's older brothers Gottfried and Jean Theodore had already preceded him. His own son Frans and Jean Theodore's sons Frans and Leo also developed into creditable sculptors. Stracké remained a professor at the Rijksakademie until 1889.

Sculptor Gerda Rubinstein (1931), the younger sister of writer Renate Rubinstein, studied at the Rijksakademie from 1949-1952. In 1957 she made the sculpture 'Children Playing', which can be found in the Oosterpark. Not long after, she settled in London. When many years later she heard from several acquaintances that they could not find the statue, she decided to go and have a look for herself. To her surprise, the sculpture was attributed to Katinka van Rood-Limpers, also a Rijksakademie alumna, and for more than thirty years the sculpting teacher of Princess Beatrix. Since 2010 the correct name is on the plaque. It took some doing, though. Rubinstein eventually sent a family member to the city district to straighten things out with the help of newspaper clippings from 1957.

One of the more recent works on the map is 'Tulip Palepai' by Jennifer Tee (1973), which since 2017, in the run-up to the opening of the North-South metro line, adorns a wall of the metro hall at Central Station. The work is a digitised mosaic of dried and pasted tulip petals and is shaped as a palepai, an Indonesian ceremonial tapestry, or ship's cloth, often with a ship on it as the dominant motif. For Tee, resident at the Rijksakademie in 2000 and 2001, many personal stories came together in this work. Her grandfather and great-grandfather both worked in the tulip trade, and her father came by ship from Indonesia to the Netherlands in 1950, together with his parents and sister. 100,000 tulip petals, fifteen tulip growers and six artists were involved in the creation of the work. The tulip petals were first picked, then selected by colour and size and finally dried in a special cabin before the actual 'making' of the artwork could begin.