Fries Museum wins national €100,000 museum prize

The Fries Museum took home one of the country's most prestigious prizes for the museum world last week, winning the 100,000-euro BankGiro Lottery Museum prize (Museumprijs). Based in Leeuwarden, Friesland, the museum won the most public votes -more than 40 percent of the total- to beat the two other finalists, Zeeuws Museum (32.2%) in Middelburg, Zeeland and the Amsterdam Museum (27.6%) in the country's capital. All in all, 71,469 people cast votes for their favourite museum online last month, which is twice as many voters as last year. Every year there is a new category to compete in. This year the Museumprijs category was for a regional or city history museum, in which the museum had to "present regional or city history in an attractive way to a broad audience," according to Nu.nl. The Fries Museum was nominated for its ability to "bring Frisian identity to a spotlight for a wide audience." The Museumprijs jury characterized the innovative and original collection as a "special combination of familiar and lesser-known stories, a very nice mix of static, aesthetic and narrative forms of presentation and optimal blending of art and history."