Maud van Suylen and Austėja Mackelaitė appointed as curators of drawings
Publication date: 24 October 2022 - 13:13
Maud van Suylen and Austėja Mackelaitė have been appointed as the Rijksmuseum’s new curators of drawings. Maud van Suylen, currently an Academic Researcher at the Rijksmuseum Print Room, will take up her new position on 1 November 2022. Austėja Mackelaitė, currently the Annette and Oscar de la Renta Assistant Curator of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will start on 1 January 2023.
The appointment of Maud van Suylen and Austėja Mackelaitė, two talented specialists of 16th- and 17th-century drawings, underscores the Rijksmuseum's commitment to one of its most renowned collections, and the continual need for research, preservation, and display of that collection for present and future generations.
Ilona van Tuinen, Head of the Rijksmuseum Print Room
Maud van Suylen
Maud van Suylen (1991) studied art history at VU University Amsterdam and has held various positions at the Print Room, first in 2014 as a Curator in training, and later as an Academic Researcher and Junior Curator. From 2015 to 2016 she catalogued Dutch and Flemish drawings at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and between 2018 and 2019 she worked as a Junior Curator at the Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt. Maud van Suylen curated the Enfants du Siècle d’Or exhibition at the Fondation Custodia in 2019 and XXL Paper at the Rijksmuseum in 2022.
Austėja Mackelaitė
Austėja Mackelaitė (Lithuania, 1987) studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and the University of Oxford. Her dissertation at The Courtauld was on the relationship between 16th-century Dutch artists and antique Roman sculpture. Austėja Mackelaitė previously worked in the US at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, where she curated the exhibition The Art of Drawing in the Early Dutch Golden Age: Selected Works from the Abrams Collection. She also worked at the British Museum, the Courtauld Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Since taking up her position at the Morgan Library & Museum in 2018, she has curated several exhibitions, including Hans Holbein: Capturing Character, in 2022.
The Rijksmuseum Print Room
The Rijksmuseum Print Room collection is one of the top five collections of works on paper in the world, with a special focus on 17th-century prints and drawings from an international perspective. In recent years, the Print Room has made great efforts to assemble a representative overview of Dutch prints and drawings of the 20th century, with the support of many private donors and funds. The collection also includes important 19th- and 20th-century photography. The print room collection comprises more than 700,000 works on paper and is managed by a team of twelve arthistorians.
Indispensable support
The Rijksmuseum is grateful for all the forms of support it receives. Government funding, contributions from the business community and funds, as well as gifts, legacies and the support of Friends are essential for the Rijksmuseum.
