ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, Open-Air-Museum in Arnhem was among the first Dutch museums to be converted from a state-run museum to a foundation. Fifteen years later, it won EMYA for reforming the methodology of museums of its type – those following the model of Swedish Skansen. Not limiting itself to representing an idyll where happy peasants in their holiday clothes were engaged in crafts or kept dancing and singing all day long, the museum took a pioneering role in venturing into the realm of more realistic and honest history. A series of projects developed by the museum became studies in controversial issues of twentieth-century rural life.
