De Pont Director Maria Schnyder On Why Financial Independence Is a Museum’s Greatest Asset
"Rita McBride once described De Pont Museum as 'an artist's dream'—and that is exactly what we strive for. It does not always make the museum the easiest place for visitors, but it does make it a unique space to experience an artist's practice in its undiluted form."
In April, the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands announced that Maria Schnyder would serve as its new director. The De Pont is a celebrated Dutch museum showing contemporary art, located in a former woolen mill in Tilburg. The museum’s collection is built around living artists, with the emphasis on the quality of the work over any other criteria. Schnyder joined De Pont in 2013 and spent the last four years as deputy director, which means she’s taking over an institution whose daily rhythms she already knows intimately. Observer recently caught up with her to discuss her new role and the unique challenges of governing an institution with such a strong artist-first ethos.
Your predecessor, Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen, arrived with decades of outside experience at the Stedelijk and the ICA—a more typical external-hire trajectory. What advantages do you see in rising from within rather than coming from outside?
I worked very closely with Martijn, and I have been deeply invested in and fully supportive of the direction in which the museum has been evolving. I can ensure continuity as a matter of course—which is essential in the case of De Pont Museum and its long-term relationships with artists—while also having a clear and critical understanding of where its untapped potential lies and how, with a small but decisive organization, we can take it to the next level.
De Pont Museum has 7,000 square meters of exhibition space, yet the entire organization amounts to only 18 full-time employees. This demands synchronization and alignment: it must operate as a well-oiled machine in order to consistently realize exhibitions of international scale and ambition.
In announcing your appointment, board chair Taco Dibbits framed De Pont’s artist-first commitment as especially urgent “in an era in which societal and audience-driven agendas are increasingly setting the tone in the museum sector.” That reads as a bit of a shot at what some of your peers are doing right now. Do you share his concerns in this regard?
I don’t think it was intended as a critique, but rather as a reflection on the exceptional position of De Pont Museum. The foundation is financially independent, allowing the museum to put artists first without being bound by other agendas. Rita McBride once described De Pont Museum as “an artist’s dream”—and that is exactly what we strive for. It does not always make the museum the easiest place for visitors, but it does make it a unique space to experience an artist’s practice in its undiluted form.
Rather than opposing other approaches in the field, it is about recognizing that De Pont Museum represents a model that is no longer self-evident, and exactly because of that, remains highly necessary in today’s cultural and political climate. It is a model I am committed to carrying forward.
The former Thomas de Beer wool mill that houses the De Pont Museum has an almost mythic status in the museum-architecture conversation—by some accounts, it helped shape the thinking behind Tate Modern. Dibbits specifically cited your “emphatic kinship” with the space in his statement. For a curator, what does the building make easy, and where does it complicate matters?
The building has a unique patina, and its spaces are very different from more conventional gallery rooms. They range from 12 small cabinets—each with two doors, originally designed to ventilate stored wool—to a vast central hall of 35 by 35 meters, where the massive wool-spinning machines once stood.
It has an open floor plan with long sightlines, meaning everything is interconnected. There is no possibility of creating closed circuits; temporary exhibitions and collection displays inevitably intertwine in the visitor’s experience. I am used to thinking in rhythmic sequences across different spaces rather than in distinct chapters. For each exhibition, we select the galleries that resonate with the works we want to show, meaning that exhibition routes are never the same.
Over the years, I have learned the various ways in which the building is generous to the art, and when it can be somewhat more capricious. Above all, I have learned to embrace it as an ally. Once you have internalized its cadence, it becomes an exceptional playground, challenging artists in the best possible way to reconsider what truly matters in the presentation of their work and inviting them to discover uncharted territory.
Your academic background is a hybrid—French literature and linguistics alongside art history at Fribourg, then the research master at Groningen. Linguists and curators don’t always work with the same tools. Has the literary-linguistic side of your training actually made its way into your curatorial practice?
For sure, though more as a kind of underlying baseline than as something that translates into explicit discourse. Linguistics has made me understand how language both reflects the world and structures how we experience it, and how different languages and cultures carve up experience in distinct ways.
From literature, I learned the value of staying with difficulty. It has instilled in me an existential sense of reward in remaining with works that do not immediately yield themselves, but demand effort and sustained attention. That sensibility has very much carried over into my curatorial practice.
Where do you see De Pont’s position within the regional landscape, and within the wider Dutch museum landscape, where the biggest names and budgets sit in the Randstad? Or is it your goal to program for the wider art world?
De Pont Museum is a destination museum—a place for those willing to make the effort to encounter contemporary art on the artist’s own terms, within an exceptional architectural setting. With regard to the regional landscape, I think we need to move beyond a binary Randstad-versus-province logic and foster a more genuinely international mindset. Tilburg is as close to Brussels and Düsseldorf as it is to Amsterdam. That geographical reality should be reflected in how we think and operate as an institution.
Hendrik Driessen set a collection philosophy of depth over breadth—follow a small number of artists over many years, acquire key works within a body of work, skip the comprehensive-coverage approach. What are the advantages of this tactic? What are your favorite pieces in the collection?
The collection has no predetermined focus on artistic lineage, social discourse, geographic origin or thematic orientation. It is about bringing contemporary voices together that resonate with, reframe and challenge one another. Personally, I tend to think of it as a gathering around a long table. When I think about further developing the collection, I imagine conversations between artists that are already thriving, those that call for a new impulse and those that have yet to emerge. And from time to time, this evolving constellation calls for a voice that resists its existing order, instead disrupting and unsettling it. In any case, inviting a new artist to join the collection signals a long-term commitment to their practice.
The collection philosophy of depth over breadth is a direct consequence of De Pont’s artist-first approach. By following an artist’s work over time and building a meaningful body, the museum is able to convey their position with both conviction and nuance. In collection displays, this results in a more concentrated viewing experience.
The focus on depth has, over the years, resulted in many exceptional ensembles that set our collection apart. I think of Thomas Schütte, for instance, a personal favorite, with Grosser Respekt as an absolute masterpiece. But also more recently acquired groups of works by, for example, Ragnar Kjartansson and Laure Prouvost are without any doubt of international significance.
De Pont remains a privately funded foundation built on Jan de Pont’s estate, without structural government subsidy. With public budgets under pressure across Europe, that independence looks increasingly like an asset. What kind of advantages does such a structure offer your institution? Is America doing it right by providing our museums with basically no public funding?
I think it is very tricky to compare the European and the American situations, but essentially, I believe that public art institutions should be part of a country’s core infrastructure. In the case of De Pont Museum, it was from the very beginning a matter of collegiality for the foundation not to apply for public funding. The idea was that if, as a private foundation, you add something to the existing institutional landscape, you should not then draw from the available public funds, but be able to sustain your own position.
Today, that financial independence allows us to remain fully committed to an artist-first mission and to carry that forward into the future. At the same time, it requires a very clear sense of direction and sharp focus. As mentioned, the organization is lean, and the museum concentrates on solo exhibitions developed in close collaboration with artists. There is no capacity to facilitate academic research or publishing programs. Our acquisitions budget is fixed, and each choice carries consequence: to select one work is to forgo another. So while De Pont enjoys full autonomy, it is within a clearly defined financial framework that demands discipline and a strong sense of focus.
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