About us
The board
The Sculpture Garden Blue Bay is managed by an enthusiastic and unpaid board that manages both the Foundation in Curaçao and its Dutch sister foundation that pursues exactly the same objective and policy and activity plan.
The board wants to paint a rich picture of Curaçaoan visual art and aims for as much variation as possible in the sculpture park in terms of styles, shapes, colours, size, composition, etc. However, selection is made on quality, professionalism and expressiveness. The Blue Bay Sculpture Garden Foundation aims to double the number of sculptures in 7 years.
The board also strives for collaboration with Dutch art institutions and museums. The aim is to promote the Curaçaoan art world in the Netherlands and to establish cooperation for exhibitions, long-term loan and transfer of knowledge back and forth within the Kingdom.
The board aims to offer paid tours to (cruise) tourists in collaboration with the Curaçao Tourist Board. We also want to offer students a special experience by setting up a non-profit education program for the schools of Curaçao that fits seamlessly with the curriculum of education. We want to develop this in close consultation with school leaders, educators and teachers of visual arts.
Additional team/ Advisors
Saskia Meijer
Project Manager
Saskia Luckmann-Meijer has been the project leader of the Blue Bay Sculpture Garden since 2021. She studied art history and art policy and management at the University of Utrecht. She has worked as a curator in museums such as the Stadshof in Zwolle and the Anne Frank House and has created exhibitions, publications, films and teaching materials on cultural and historical subjects. She developed teaching materials for the World Children's Festival and co-produced the annual traveling festival with foreign youth theater groups, including a Caribbean edition. In addition to the Blue Bay Sculpture Garden, Saskia is also associated with the Culture Chameleon Foundation.
Jan Gulmans
Counselor
Jan Gulmans (1945) was the founder and chairman of the Foundation from 2017 to 2021, and the driving force behind the further development of the Sculpture Garden. He has been collecting drawings, etchings, screen prints, lithographs, paintings and sculptures for over 40 years. He has a weakness for sculpture, regardless if it is made of glass, cardboard, textile, stone, marble, iron or bronze. He limits himself to the art of Dutch and Antillean artists, most of whom produce their work in Curaçao. Since 2013 he has regularly contributed articles about art and culture to the Antilliaans Dagblad. A collection of 54 articles originally published in the aforementioned newspaper has been published in book form with the title “Beeldende kunst van Curaçao, Aruba, Bonaire, Saba, by LM Publishers, Volendam, the Netherlands. He appreciates the importance of art and culture for the development of tourism. (photo: Louise Brecheisen)
Freddy Curiel
Counselor
Freddy Curiel was the first treasurer of the Foundation, from 2017 to 2021. He is not an art connoisseur but he is an art lover. He has expressed his affinity with art and culture by, among other things, his many years of chairmanship of the Supervisory Board of NV Stadsherstel. Various art activities have been, and continue to be, developed in buildings belonging to this organization. Because he attaches great importance to education, his interest in the Sculpture Route has grown. This open-air Sculpture Garden will prove to be of great value to schools and other training institutions. Through his connections with many social organizations, he will promote this unique Sculpture Garden and see to it that it is widely supported.
Nicole Henriquez
Counselor
Co-director of Galerie Landhuis Bloemhof, curator, collector and author.
After successfully completing a course in PR and marketing in France at the École Supérieure de Presse, Nicole Henriquez (1955) has, since 1980, focused on writing about art and organizing exhibitions at home and abroad. She is a specialist in naive art from Curaçao. She was involved in the research leading to the appearance of the biography of Hipolito Ocalia, Curaçao’s most important naive painter (1992), and was responsible for the presence of naive art at the 1988 exhibition "Bida i Kolo" in the Stedelijk Museum in Schiedam. In 1995 and 1999 she curated two exhibitions in the then Museum de Stadshof in Zwolle. Among other achievements, she is the co-author of "Curacao - Dutch Caribbean Architecture & Style" and "The Governor’s Mansion of the Netherlands Antilles".
Jan Teeuwisse
Counselor
Professor of History, Theory and Practice of Modern Sculpture at the University of Leiden.
Jan Teeuwisse (1955) has been from 2002 to 2022 the director of Museum Beelden aan Zee in Scheveningen and, from 1990 to 2002, was head curator of Modern Art at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague. He is the author of, among other texts, books about Dutch sculptors such as Sondaar, Kaas, d'Hont and Wezelaar (dissertation), the editor of magazines including the RKD Bulletin, a board member of foundations, a member of advisory committees, a jury member and a member of the Vetting Committee of the TEFAF. He has given dozens of introductions, talks and lectures on art as well as on sculpture. The building blocks for his upcoming magnum opus on modern sculpture can be found in his 2013 lecture entitled 'The Netherlands – Land of Sculptors, an Apology’.
Jennifer Smit
Counselor
Art historian, curator and author
The Curaçaoan professor Jennifer Smit (1951) is an art historian, independent curator and author. She writes art reviews for the Antilliaans Dagblad. In 1996 she published the reference book “Monuments and Statues of the Netherlands Antilles”. In 1999 she was the curator of the mega art exhibition "Arte 99" in Curaçao. With Adi Martis she wrote “Arte” in 2001, the first overview of the history of the visual arts in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. In 2003 she was awarded the prestigious Cola Debrot prize for culture from the island territory of Curaçao. In 2010 she and Felix de Rooy organized the exhibition "Antepasado di Futuro: Curaçao Classics Visual Arts 1900-2010". Their eponymous book was published in 2012. That same year she wrote an essay about Curaçao for the Yale publication “Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World”. In 2014, at the commemoration of 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the Kingdom, she curated the exhibition "Exploring the Past to Envisage the Future" in the Curaçao Museum in 2014.
Lusette Verboom-Fairbairn
Counselor
Owner of Galerie Alma Blou, curator, collector and author
Lusette Verboom (1956) opened the Gallery "Kas di Alma Blou, Gallery and Gift Shop" in town in 1996, after which she moved to the monumental Habaai plantation house in 2006. The Alma Blou gallery focuses primarily on exhibiting art by prominent local and international artists. It also has a separate "Folk Art" store where local arts and crafts are sold.
As chairman of the Arte ‘99 foundation, she was responsible for the" Antepasado di Futuro "exhibition (and the publication of the eponymous book), which was organized in 2010 to celebrate Curacao’s autonomy within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. This exhibition was opened by the Dutch King Willem Alexander and Queen Maxima.
She was also a co-author of the book Governor’s Mansion House of the Netherlands Antilles, A tour of Antillean and Dutch Art, 2008, published by the Cabinet of the Governor of the Netherlands Antilles. She is the publisher of 3 publications Galeria di Artista 1, Babs de Brabander, 2, Gea Bos and 3, Elis Juliana. In 2007 she published the book "Haiku the loop di Animal / Haiku with animal voices" by Elis Juliana. She is the co-translator in Papiamentu of the book "Yubi Kirindongo - Rebel in Art and Soul".
To promote arts and crafts on the island, she has given several courses for underprivileged women in making handicraft products and from 2012-2017 organized monthly arts and crafts markets to promote their sale.
From 2003-2008 she contributed a local art section for the Antilliaanse Nieuwsbrief (Antillean Newsletter) in the Netherlands and wrote several articles about art for local newspapers.
In 2014 she was named a Knight in the Order of Orange Nassau for her contribution to the stimulation of local art and the volunteer work she does, among other things, as chairman of the CITRO sea rescue organization.
Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern
Counselor
Curator, exhibition organizer, artist and author
Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern (Amsterdam 1946) lives in Rotterdam and is a freelance exhibition organizer and consultant. Until 2011 he worked for the Rotterdam Center for Visual Arts, where he was responsible for international policy.
From 2003 to 2006 he was director of the TENT exhibition space in Rotterdam. He previously worked as a senior staff member for Visual Arts at the Rotterdam Art Foundation. He was a director of the Amsterdam Artists' Association Arti et Amicitiae and educational assistant at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Thomas Meijer worked on various international projects and exhibitions including Sonsbeek 86 in Arnhem; IS in the HAL (1989) commissioned by the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts Design and Architecture; the Dutch entries at the Biennale of Cairo (1996) and Manifesta Rotterdam (1996). In 2006 he initiated the four-year Paramaribo Span art project with the in which 27 artists from Suriname and the Netherlands participated. In 2013 he wrote the monograph about the Curaçaoan artist Yubi Kirindongo for his exhibition at Museum Beelden aan Zee in Scheveningen (2014).
He has also held various board positions and done committee work for, among others, the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts Design and Architecture; Art Council The Hague; De Appel Amsterdam Foundation.