Written by Eeva Hytönen, Vantaa City Culture and Library Services

STRAAT is a street art and graffiti museum in Amsterdam that opened in 2020. The museum operates in an old shipyard hall, which was emptied of its original use in the 1970s. The exhibition hall is huge: The hall also functions as a collection warehouse for the time being. In this case, the museum designation for STRAAT does not directly correspond to the Finnish museum standard, because, for example, the conditions are not museum-like. We also discussed this in the round.

Vantaa cultural services from Finland were guided by STRAAT's exhibition curator David Roos, who has collaborated with street art collective Street Art Vantaa in 2017-2018, when the Seinähullu Vantaa project was implemented in Vantaa. David talked about the curation of the exhibitions, the work of the artists and the life cycle of the works.

STRAAT's collection increases every year with around 35 works that the artists paint on site. Artists working in the exhibition space is part of the exhibition program. At the same time, the exhibition space also functions as a storage for works, because the works painted on advertising tarpaulins that have accumulated in the collection are stored behind the works on display. The dimensions of the works are in accordance with the space: the heights and widths are several meters. Smaller works would of course be lost in the space, and on the other hand, street art works have always been larger than traditional museum works.

Next to the museum building, there are also containers where popular graffiti workshops are held on Saturdays during the summer season. A lot of school groups also visit STRAAT, and the museum cooperates with Mocca Amsterdam (producer of cultural education programs).

The street art works on display were versatile and different from each other. However, the main part was paintings, but our tour included one sculpture installation and an installation in which the public could participate by writing their experiences on post-it notes and gluing them to the wall of the work.

Although there were differences in operations, resources, and scale, there was also a lot of familiarity and commonality between museum work in Vantaa and Amsterdam. The visit sparked new ideas and encouraged international cooperation. Vantaa City Culture and Library Services are grateful for our Erasmus+ project Kulpa liikkeessä.