The Amsterdam Museum is a bustling place that has done some bold work. I had the pleasure of meeting with curator Annemarie de Wildt, who has done exhibitions on prostitution, tattoos, and the city's 1960s countercultural art movement, among many others. On my visit, I was particularly struck by a design strategy that recurs in several exhibitions: shifting visual frames in ways that encourage visitors look closely and see differently.
The exhibition Amsterdam DNA gives a high-tech chronological overview of the city's history but makes surprising use of an old-fashioned medium: paintings. Each room features peephole places that give a magnified close-up of a real painting that hangs in the interior courtyard across the way. It's hard to convey this in photos, but...here's a picture of someone looking through a viewer.
And here's one of a painting, taken through the viewer:
And here are paintings hanging on the wall on the other side of the peephole viewer:
Accompanying labels help us see the paintings: "Militia group portraits show male bonding among Amsterdam's elite and upper middle class." This closeup viewing gives a way in to a medium that can often seem impenetrable (to me), and the technique nicely reinforces the videos, which often animate figures from these same paintings.
The museum uses another kind of visual framing to tell the story of the orphanage that was on the museum's site from 1580 and 1960 (yes, this is a very old building!). It creates a series of vignettes in boxlike spaces that were originally lockers. Boys as young as twelve worked as apprentices and, when they returned home, they stored their tools in these boxes. Girls, another window explains, also worked, but not outside of the building, so they didn't have lockers.
With steeply angled sides, each box is like a mini-diorama that traces the story of the orphaned children and the building all the way to the present. This one describes how in the 1950s, the lockers became hutches for rabbits that the children kept as pets:
There are three-dozen vignettes in all:
Finally, the museum offers a then-and-now comparison through the frame of a street view, as seen from bicycle. Pedaling triggers movement down the street. With the bell on the handlebars, the cyclist can switch back and forth between the contemporary view and the same street as it looked in 1927. There are no brakes.
