The Gerrit Rietveld Academie is a small-scale, independent, internationally oriented university of fine arts and design. We are committed to developing, implementing, positioning, and protecting research-based and experimental art education. Based on practice and a critical engagement with society, we encourage the exploration, questioning and imagination of the world, and contribute to alternative discourses, processes, and forms of making.
Based on this mission, we stand for an open and socially engaged attitude towards each other and society. We educate artists and designers in an open culture, where diversity, inclusiveness, solidarity, and social awareness are self-evident core aspects, and where concern for the natural environment is recognisable in everyday practice.
As an art school, we stand for creating different mindsets to understand the world. That world is inherently complex, which entails that we stand for nuanced positions to also see, hear, understand each other.
In our teaching and research, as well as the projects developed by students, we convey our values and critical position. In doing so, the departments (graduate programmes) and master's programmes have a high degree of freedom to comment on current affairs, as artists and designers often relate to a current context in their work, which can also be political.
Our international community consists of students and staff who come from all over the world, including conflict zones. We call on students, faculty and staff members to support and respect each other. We stand for consent, dialogue, the strengthening of democracy through conversation and good debate. We speak out against violence, exclusion, oppression, cruelty, and racism.