The Life of Marcella van Zanten

Laren, the Netherlands,  1959

Daughter of Annemarie Eilers and Ek van Zanten

Born in the painters’ village of Laren (North Holland), Marcella was surrounded by a family that included architects, publishers, art dealers, and artists in various fields (musicians, visual artists).

The bar was set high, and choosing an art program was therefore not an obvious choice. She initially chose to study psychology after working for several years as a nurse assistant in healthcare. Her grandfather, an art dealer, did not consider this a good choice.

Academic Education

The Rijksakademie (National Academy of Fine Arts) where Marcella started was somewhat old-fashioned, with a heavy emphasis on life drawing by artists such as Vaarson Morel. She ultimately chose the Amsterdam Academy of Fine Arts (the former National Teacher Training College near the Rijksmuseum), where a family friend, Berend Bodenkamp, also taught alongside his work at the Rietveld Academy. She took painting and printmaking lessons from Eric de Nie, who also taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague.

After gratudation, she traveled to Russia and Africa and eventually joined Robert Smit in America, where she worked with ceramics and was taught by Frank Ozereko.

She exhibited her work in the gallery on the university campus. She also organized Black History Month there, featuring artists from the East Village, New York.

Back in Amsterdam, she worked for two periods at the European Ceramic Work Centre. Meanwhile she and a group of artists shared a studio, “het Apenhuis” (the Monkey House), on Kraijenhofstraat in Amsterdam, where her grandfather used to order frames from the Heijdenrijk frame shop. The comic book artist Typex also worked in that space.

The ceramic kiln she purchased was moved to a ground-floor studio at the Nieuwe Meer artists’ complex in the 1990s. The larger ceramics became too heavy to produce in the attic. Meanwhile she taught four times a week at an art center in IJmuiden, where she continued to work for over 36 years.

She created installations at various locations in the Netherlands using different materials. The ceramics were made in smaller pieces to be presented together as a larger whole, such as in a “moth box” on a wall in the lamppost factory in Hoorn.

The moths that flock to the lampposts solidified in fired clay and bottles of brushes.

Marcella organized numerous exhibitions, including a series for many years about the Zomerdijkstraat artists at the auction house Glerum (https://www.zomerdijkstraatretrospectief.nl/). One exhibition took place in a studio at Zomerdijkstraat opened by the mayor Job Cohen. The series concluded with a retroperspective at Arti et Amicitiae (2010) in collaboration with Stefan Strauss and Anika Ohlerich. She gave lectures on various artists at different locations. She obtained her master’s degree in Art Education at the AHK in 2011. Since 2013 she has also worked as a guide in various museums such as the Kröller-Müller, the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Mauritshuis, the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum and the Fries Museum.

Literature

Text written by Marcella van Zanten