National Glasmuseum
At the National Glass museum innovation, heritage, and co-creation overlap. However, there was a significant gap between ideal and practice.
Two months after Mare started, the decline was halted, and after another month, growth occurred. In the end, the museum managed to meet its budget for the first time in years. A large international glas-event taking place over multiple days could go on after all. After half a year a plan for the collection was developed, necessary interventions in the building were initiated, IT-management was renewed and a new director could be recruited.
The Glasmuseum attracted Mare because of the combination between heritage and modern art, the ‘presenting’ in a museum-setting coupled with the ‘doing’ in the glassblowing workshop, which seemingly made it into an ideal location to introduce an innovative type of entrepreuneurship. This proved to be difficult in practice. Not only were there significant challenges on all fronts, leaving little time and space for innovation, but the glassblowing world turned out to be resistant to change as well.
The National Glass Museum is situated on a beautiful location on the Linge. It was drastically renovated in 2009, and the striking architecture initially attracted large sums of visitors. However, the enthusiastic director left a year after the building was finished and the successor did not manage to attract the necessary amount of visitors. After a series of conflicts between several involved parties in various domains Marjo van Schaik was commissioned as interim director, in the winter of 2017. The museum suffered from a very precarious financial situation and a vulnerable organisation of personnel. The assignment was to structure the organisation, to heal internal and external relations, to turn the decline of visitors into a growth, and meet the budget. Quickly more issues surfaced. The number of visitors declined even more rapidly and the Heritage authority published a critical report on the maintenance of the collection, in addition to several location-specific and organisational challenges that had cropped up in the years before but had never been dealt with.
More information? Please contact mare@marjovanschaik.nl