News — Feb 3, 2025

WOMEN STILL STRONGLY UNDERREPRESENTED IN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS (BUT THEIR SHARE IS INCREASING)

This year, the Theodora Niemeijer Prize has been awarded to Femke Herregraven (Nijmegen, 1982). The prize, worth €100,000, is entirely at the artist's disposal. A quarter of the amount is allocated for the purchase of a work by the winner for a Dutch museum—this year, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, which nominated Herregraven. The Theodora Niemeijer Prize is awarded every two years to a mid-career female artist who resides and/or works in the Netherlands or holds Dutch nationality. This year, three museums nominated artists for the prize: in addition to the Stedelijk Museum, these were the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven) and Museum Arnhem.

The Theodora Niemeijer Prize is the largest unrestricted art prize in the Netherlands. The award ceremony will take place on Saturday, March 8 (International Women’s Day) at the Stedelijk Museum.

EXCEPTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
The jury* of the Theodora Niemeijer Prize 2025 selected Femke Herregraven, an artist on the verge of greater national and international recognition. The jury believes that this prize will help her take a significant next step in her career. It will also strengthen her collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, increasing the visibility of her work to a broader audience in the Netherlands. According to the jury, Herregraven’s work demonstrates exceptional intelligence and ambition, remaining relevant beyond the present moment without becoming overly heavy or inaccessible. In recent years, she has undergone significant artistic development.
*The jury consisted of Caroline de Pont (museum De Pont), Zoë Gray (Director of Exhibitions, Bozar, Brussels), Bart Rutten (artistic director, Centraal Museum Utrecht), artist and 2023 TNP winner Sara Seijn Chang (Sara van der Heide), and Andrea Davina (director, Niemeijer Fund Foundation).

ELUSIVE FINANCIAL SYSTEMS
Herregraven’s work is rooted in extensive research and explores elusive systems that humans develop and refine to the point of abstraction, making them comprehensible only to a small group of specialists. These systems, which have far-reaching effects on culture, society, and ecology, are captured by Herregraven in her multidisciplinary visual art practice. She employs a wide range of media, from algorithms and woodcarving to immersive soundscapes. Her work primarily focuses on value systems that shape the world outside of human perception. She is particularly intrigued by the high level of abstraction in financial systems, exposing their absurdity and the alienation of the very people who created them. In 2023, the Stedelijk Museum acquired two of her works.

Rein Wolfs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, stated: “Femke Herregraven’s work is truly unique. It is layered, engaged, sculptural, hybrid, and unlike anything else we know. As a researcher-artist or artist-researcher, she encodes her critical findings in an incredibly intriguing way. At the Stedelijk, we are especially pleased that she has won this important award, allowing us to join forces with Femke Herregraven and the Niemeijer Fund to make a strong statement about the necessity of better representation of female artists in museums.”

GENDER BALANCE IN ART
The Theodora Niemeijer Prize was introduced in 2012 because works by female artists are still underrepresented in exhibitions and museum collections. In the Netherlands, works by female artists make up only 17% of the permanent collection displays in the top 28 modern and contemporary art museums.* However, museum acquisitions are beginning to address this imbalance. Since Rein Wolfs took office as director, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has aimed for 50% of contemporary art acquisitions to be by female artists. The actual figures were 53% in 2021, 46.2% in 2023, and representation of female artists in museum displays has also increased significantly. While 64% of art academy students are women and more than half of working artists in the Netherlands are female (54%), they still earn 20% less than their male counterparts.**

*See also the article ‘How Much Attention Do Dutch Museums Pay to Female Artists?’ by Wieteke van Zeil, Volkskrant, December 27, 2019. 
**See the Boekman Foundation report

FEMKE HERREGRAVEN
Femke Herregraven’s work examines the impact of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and daily life. Her research into the interplay between financial markets, risk, and the physical world forms the basis of her sculptures, drawings, films, and hybrid installations. Over the past decade, she has focused on financial, geological, and climatic self-organizing systems that shape and disrupt daily life. A recurring theme in her work is the financialization of the future as a crisis, which she explores through catastrophe bonds as speculative instruments for redistributing risk and disaster. By weaving together textual, computational, and (non)verbal languages—expressed in imagery, sound, drawings, and speculative fiction—Herregraven reflects on how contemporary future models not only shape our perception of reality but also influence the very foundations on which it rests. Herregraven is an alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (2017–2018) and earned the Creator Doctus title at the Sandberg Institute in 2024. She was shortlisted for the Prix de Rome in 2019 and won the Evens Art Prize in 2023.

THE NIEMEIJER FUND
The Theodora Niemeijer Prize is part of the Niemeijer Fund, founded in 1996 by Theodora Niemeijer to support the development of individual artists and art institutions. Winners of the previous six editions were Sara Seijn Chang (Sara van der Heide, 2023), Silvia Martes (2021), Josefin Arnell (2018), Sissel Marie Tonn (2016), Sachi Miyachi (2014), and Sarah van Sonsbeeck (2012). The prize provides support for the further development and visibility of artists. The acquisition of a work for a Dutch museum is a means of improving the representation of female artists.

THEODORA NIEMEIJER
Theodora Niemeijer (Groningen, 1912 – Laren, 2004) was the daughter of the Groningen-based tobacco manufacturer Niemeijer. She felt it was important to use her wealth for a positive purpose, was a great lover of art and culture, and therefore established her own foundation. When she passed away in 2004, unmarried and without children, she bequeathed part of her fortune to this foundation.