Rixt Bosma (NL)
Curator
Rixt Bosma
After studying Art History at Leiden University, Rixt A. Bosma has been working since 2004 as an independent art historian and curator, with an emphasis on photo history, social documentary photography and photojournalism. Clients include museums, university libraries, cultural heritage institutes, government, corporate archives, photographers and artists. She is based in the Netherlands, and has become an avid traveler to the American Southwest. She also pursues interests in graphic arts, music, songwriting and collecting antique photographs.
Examples of her projects are:
Among her published writings are two books with the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, in the series Rijkmuseum Studies in Photography, supported by the Manfred and Hanna Heiting Fund. In 2011 “Photography meets Film: Capa, Ivens and Fernhout in China, 1938” was published. The study focuses on previously unpublished photographs by Robert Capa, who accompanied Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens and his cameraman John Fernhout during their creation of “The 400 Million” about the second Sino-Japanese War. In 2017 “Document Nederland” was published in the same series. It’s a study about the forty years of the annual documentary photography commission by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, which resulted in over 3000 vintage prints that capture various subjects in the cultural and social-economic contemporary history of the Netherlands.
Since 2009 Rixt has been a research associate for Inge Bondi in Princeton, NJ on her biographical book about the Austrian American photographer Ernst Haas (1921 – 1986), one of the early photographers to join Magnum Photos. Inge Bondi, (b. 1925) was stockholder and manager special projects at the New York Magnum office between 1950 and 1970.
Between 2010 and 2019 Rixt worked on many extended visits to the USA with American photographer Dan Budnik (1933-2020) on his photo archive. The archiving process with Budnik includes the recording of oral histories, documenting biographical data, and contributing to special projects, like the creation of the book “Marching To The Freedom Dream” (Trolley Books, London 2014), with photographs of the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and three seminal Civil Rights Marches in the period 1958-1965.
Starting after her studies as a traveling exhibitions manager, Rixt has curated in recent years photography exhibitions. In 2021, the retrospective exhibition ‘Fred Stein: Dresden, Paris, New York. Photographer in Exile’ opened in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam, which Rixt co-curated with Bernadette van Woerkom, long time photography curator of the Jewish Museum. It was the first time the photographs of the German Jewish photographer Stein (1909 – 1967) were shown in the Netherlands.
Her clients include Paleis Het Loo, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Stichting Academisch Erfgoed, Nationaal Archief, Nederlands fotomuseum, Shell Historic archives at Shell International, Special Collections at the Leiden University Library, ABN AMRO BANK Art and History Foundation, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Stichting Paradox and Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
Website: www.rixtbosma.nl
