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And the American artist Molly Ackerman        by Willemijn Stokvis   translation to English  by Peter Pot
In the library of the Art Historian Faculty at the University of Leiden.
June 7 - July 7, 2001

I have the pleasure to say something at the opening of the exhibition of the American artist Molly Ackerman and the Leiden photographer Fred Rohde, both living in Leiden and partners in life for seven years already.
Fred Rohde gives courses for beginning photographers at the Leiden Academic Arts Centre, which granted them the possibility to show their work on its premises.
I happened to get to know them only recently. I visited Molly in the gallery in the centre of Amsterdam where se shows an overview of her work. She, by the way, runs this gallery herself. I interviewed Fred in their house at the Middelstegracht in Leiden, where he showed me much of his work.
Their way of living is based on improvisation. They both are receptive to everything that crosses their path and I appreciate their very active social role.
The same openness I find in their work.
Their own explanation for their good relationship are their antipodal characters and the use of  different ways of expressing themselves in art.
Molly is the extrovert, who expresses her deepest feelings in an aesthetic act of radiant colours and an intriguing use of materials. On top of that she wants to share her inspiration with others. She achieves this in painting performances accompanied by musicians, dancers, and poets. Working together with other people at paintings or teaching children and adults is another way of reaching her goal.
Fred is the more introvert observer who searches with his camera for archetypes, enhancing this effect by the use of special printing techniques.
One could call him a somehow socially committed photographer. He has been a photo journalist for various Leiden newspapers and at that time he did not consider himself to be an art photographer. He photographed for example the squat and punk scene in Amsterdam.
Both their work is based on a lively interest in human archetypes. They are not that different after all. The way they work is directly linked to the fifties. Fred's photographs bring back the scenes from Ed van der Elsken in the streets of Paris.
Molly's paintings are even more clearly connected to the fifties. She studied on a grant at the famous 'Art Students League' in New York, where also Jackson Pollock received his training. She had lessons from the artist Richard Pousette-Dart, who belongs to the first generation of abstract expressionists. She built a special relationship with him. He taught her to feel completely free and loose and to approach her paint and other materials from that state.
From that freedom, passed on to her by the abstract expressionists, she started her own movement in the artists colony of Woodstock, where she has lived for a long time. She named the movement 'Expansionist Art Movement'.
This movement aspires in the first place the sharing of inspiration with other artists and non-artists in the form of performances.
(I informed her about other artists in the fifties preceding her, which she didn't know. What is usually reckoned to be the first staged 'happening' was the 'Theatre Piece No 1' from the composer John Cage, which was performed at the Black Mountain College of North Carolina in 1952. Painters Robert Rauschenberg and Franz Kline, poet Charles Olson, and choreographer Merce Cunningham participated in this performance.)
Expansionism for Molly implies the absolute absence of feeling herself to be an expressionist. She not only wants to reveal her feelings but also to open up completely to the surrounding world and feel connected to the cosmic aspects of  it.
The essence, the goal of her movement can be summarised as: 'emotional growth crossing personal borders'.
Although she claims not to be religious, her work definitely calls up all sorts of associations.
For her, the ever recurring round and square basic forms might be symbols of the feminine and masculine elements and maybe even for an infinity of other spiritual matters. She composes her works in an instinctive way in and over it with acrylic paint on wood, grass, metal, rice-paper, sand, marble grindings, and all other materials, possibly found in the street.
In the mean time she had many exhibitions and conducted many performances. An encounter with a Dutch artist in New York brought her to Leiden. She joined in a performance where a modern version was painted of the Last Judgement of Lucas van Leyden.
At the performance she and Fred met.
Since then the photographer Fred found the courage to call himself an artist. It was Molly's inspiring personality that made him take that step.
They now both more or less apply expansionism in and from Leiden: lots of foreign artists visit their house, they both teach, and Molly makes performances and organises exhibitions.
She made performances in Thailand, where she also had an important exhibition and works of her are included in collections.
Together they were the first western artists to take part in a Central European Artist Camp in the little village of Tállya in Hungary. There Molly made works of art from all kind of things that she found in the streets which gave her the feeling of coming closer to that country.
Fred photographed the peasantry of Hungary. He avoided indiscretion by using a simple LOMO camera of Russian make. The results he called 'LOMO-graphy'. The black and white pictures he made are slightly nostalgic to which soft printing of the negatives also contributed.
His contacts with Romanian photographers made him decide to join the Romanian 'Baia Mare Euro Art Photogroup'. He meets with them yearly in order to record within the bounds of possibility, a touch of the original Romanian culture. His interest in people is once again obvious in the results. He also exhibited with this group in Romania. 
One could go on telling about these two artists, who had many exhibitions home and abroad. I hope this short introduction has brought you a little bit closer to the work that they show here.