Tropical Museum

The Tropenmuseum ( German Tropenmuseum ) is an ethnological museum in Amsterdam in the Netherlands . It is one of the largest museums in Amsterdam.

history

The Koloniaal Museum ("Colonial Museum ") was founded in Haarlem in 1864 and opened to the public in 1871. It was built to inform the Dutch population about life in the former Dutch colonies of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia ), Dutch Guiana (now Suriname ) and the Netherlands Antilles . In 1910 the Koloniaal Institute and the Koloniaal Museum merged to form the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT, “Royal Tropical Institute”), which still operates the museum today. The institute initially served to conduct research to increase the profit from the colonies, for example to improve coffee production. Another forerunner of the Tropical Museum was the Ethnographic Museum Artis in Amsterdam.

In 1926 the current building of the Tropenmuseum in Linnaeusstraat was opened after eleven years of construction. After Indonesia proclaimed its independence in 1945, the collection was expanded to include objects from other areas of the tropics. In the 1960s and 1970s, the focus was increasingly on development policy issues such as poverty and hunger. The aim of KIT is to increase awareness of other cultures and to promote communication with these cultures.

In 2015, 182,000 visitors visited the Tropical Museum.

Collection and events

The central hall of the museum

The collection comprises around 175,000 objects, including around 21,000 textiles, mainly from Indonesia, and 5,500 musical instruments. There are also 155,000 historical photographs from the years 1855 to 1940, mostly from the Dutch colonies of the time. A large number of the photos were bequeathed to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license in 2009 . The museum has around 10,000 drawings, paintings and documents.

In addition to a permanent exhibition, the museum also has special exhibitions that include ethnological and historical objects as well as traditional and contemporary visual arts and photographs. The permanent exhibition focuses on the extensive collections from the former Dutch colonies. The different rooms of the permanent exhibition are assigned to the regions of Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia and North Africa, Africa south of the Sahara, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Tropenmuseum junior is a section specially set up for children in the early 1970s with numerous interactive exhibits.

The Tropenteater is also operated by KIT. Theater groups and musicians from numerous countries perform there.

Location and architecture

The museum is located in the Amsterdam-Oost district on the Linnaeusstraat. The building, completed in 1926, was designed by Johannes Jacob van Nieukerken and completed by his son Marie Adrianus van Nieukerken. At that time it was the largest building in Amsterdam and is particularly rich in structural and visual allusions to the colonies of that time. In 2003 it was declared a Rijksmonument .

The central part of the building is a large hall . The exhibition rooms are on the ground floor and on two galleries around the hall .