Schokkenbroek puts wind in museum’s sails
Joost Schokkenbroek’s resume is impressive: Head curator of science programs at the National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, senior editor for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Maritime History, maritime history professor at the University of Amsterdam.
So what’s he doing in Vancouver? More specifically, why did Schokkenbroek leave behind a massive and recently renovated national museum in his home country to take the job as executive director at the Vancouver Maritime Museum — an important but under-funded, aging, outdated and largely unappreciated institution?
Let’s go with the simple answer first.
In the summer of 2016, he and his wife Josje SchokkenbroekSmit spent four days in Vancouver before taking a cruise ship to Alaska. They fell in love with the city.
Being Dutch, the first thing they did was rent bikes. After two rounds of Stanley Park, they headed over to Vanier Park where they planned to get coffee and some pastries at the museum before touring through it.
“There wasn’t even a coffee machine — no paninis, no pancakes,” he says over lunch at an Italian bakery. He still marvels that along such a well-travelled and scenic stretch of seawall between Granville Island and Kits Beach, there’s nowhere to get a coffee.
Aside from the dearth of coffee, “We were enchanted by its charms and its potential,” he says. They were also struck by the building ’s “odd, but iconic,” design, which cloaks the “mesmerizing, tantalizing ” St. Roch.
The St. Roch is the storied RCMP ship that was the first to circumnavigate North America, the first to transit the Northwest Passage from west to east and the first to make a round-trip voyage through the passage in a single season.
Six months after their visit, an academic colleague from UBC contacted Schokkenbroek. The museum’s trustees were searching for a replacement for retiring director Ken Burton.
“Within a split second of telling my wife, she said, ‘Why don’t you apply? It’s a great opportunity to take the helm of a museum,’” he says.
In June, Schokkenbroek became the fifth executive director in 15 years. He’s not naive about the challenges he faces, nor is his wife. She’s stayed on as principal of a large secondary school in Delft, joining him for holidays and, permanently, once he’s righted the ship.
But it’s the museum’s potential, not the problems, that attracted the 56-year-old. He wants to shift the focus beyond the St. Roch itself to put its accomplishments in the context of centuries and even millenniums of maritime feats along the Canadian Pacific and Arctic coasts.
For visitors who aren’t from here, Schokkenbroek says the museum needs to provide a better sense of Vancouver’s present and future place as a maritime centre. That means more artifacts and more use of technology to link those tangible pieces of history to the stories.
Vancouver is home to Canada’s largest port. Because of that, Schokkenbroek envisions a museum of both national and international importance. And, he says, it doesn’t hurt that the museum has a spectacular and easily accessible location as well as heritage harbour.
Figuring out how to do it all has kept him busy seven days a week since he arrived. He’s encouraged the staff to share even their wildest ideas and he’s working hard to gain their trust and support as well as that of board members on the non-profit society that manages the museum on behalf of the City of Vancouver.
By February, he hopes to present a shared vision to the public.
Before any substantial change can happen, Schokkenbroek and the board need to raise money. This year’s operating budget is $1.3 million — 30 times less than the institution he came from. It has a staff of 15 and an enormous backlog of uncatalogued items in its collection that has somewhere close to 125,000 photographs and upwards of 25,000 artifacts.
Schokkenbroek rhymes off a wish list: two more curators, three more staff in marketing and public relations, an assistant librarian and one or two more to round out the administrative staff.
But there’s also a dire need for basic structural work on the building itself as Schokkenbroek found out earlier this week when torrential rainwater started leaking into the building. As a historian, among his many concerns about the leaks is the risk water poses to the book collection that’s housed in the museum’s basement library.
Despite it all, he seems up for the myriad challenges and is bursting with ideas about everything from the children’s programming to future exhibitions and — of course — the possibility of an on-site cafe.