Nuart at twenty-five
The festival that argued street art belongs to the people walking past reaches its twenty-fifth year without a September edition at home. Where its idea went instead.
The first Nuart took place in Stavanger in 2001, which makes 2026 its twenty-fifth year. The town held no September festival to mark it. The organisers stopped running Nuart in festival form there in 2022, and the anniversary arrived with the idea living elsewhere, in a spring edition in Aberdeen and an academic journal still edited from Stavanger. The walls it left around a Norwegian oil town are still there too.
From new media to the street
Nuart did not start as a street-art event. Its founder, Martyn Reed, has described a festival that began with new media and the first wave of digital art, a sibling of the electronic music festival he had launched in the town a year earlier, and that turned to the street once the digital field began to feel settled. The festival’s own archive of past editions opens in 2006. By 2007 its guest list read like a register of the stencil and paste-up generation: Blek le Rat from Paris, Eine, Nick Walker and Slinkachu from Britain, Logan Hicks from the United States, Herakut from Germany, M-City from Poland, with the Norwegians Dolk and Pøbel on home ground.
The shape that followed became familiar to anyone who went. From the first week of September an invited group of artists painted walls indoors and out, with a small crew working long days so that everything was finished for the public weekend. Alongside ran Nuart Plus, a programme of talks, debates and films with a two-day symposium at Tou Scene, the town’s centre for contemporary art. Out of the symposium grew Nuart Journal, a peer-reviewed publication set up for work that art history and the established institutions had mostly left out.
An argument about public culture
What made Nuart worth following was less the names than the case it kept making. Street art, in the festival’s telling, belonged to the people who walk past it before it belonged to whoever paid for the wall. Reed held that unsanctioned work was a legitimate form of public speech about who controls shared space, and that a large commissioned mural could lose the bite of a tag or stencil put in the right place. By 2014 he was openly worried about a touring circuit in which the same headline painters did the same kind of wall at one festival after another.
The festival acted on that worry slowly. When the 2020 edition was cancelled, the announcement explained that Nuart had spent several years cutting back on large murals in favour of smaller, human-scale interventions that would give the public some agency and the feeling that anyone could have a go. The pieces made around Stavanger in the lockdown years show it: stickers sized for billboards and digital screens, brass plaques screwed to memorial benches, health warnings attached to public sculptures, stencils on the road surface. Plenty of it was easy to walk past without noticing, and that was deliberate.
The 2019 edition had already leaned that way. Painters such as Hyuro, the Argentine artist Tamara Djurovic, who died in Valencia in November 2020, shared the programme with Paul Harfleet, who plants pansies where homophobic abuse has happened, and with the Parisian artist OX, who works inside the frames of billboards.
The pause
In 2022 the organisers called a halt. Twenty years of producing walls and symposia over a fortnight with a long public weekend, they wrote, was no longer the format that best suited them, the culture or the public. Individual productions would go on in Stavanger and further afield. The notice on the festival’s archive site, signed by Reed as curator and founder for 2001 to 2022, leaves a door open: if the town’s politicians improve the way cultural funding works, Nuart may come back. Until then the archive site is the record of those years, edition by edition.
For the walls themselves, the nearest thing to a catalogue is the collection Nuart set up with Google Arts & Culture in June 2021. It launched with more than three hundred works from the festival’s years on the street, and fourteen illustrated essays on its history and its effect on the region.
Where the idea went
Aberdeen has kept the festival format going since 2017. Aberdeen Inspired delivers it with the city council, and Reed still curates. It has had its own trouble. There was no edition in 2025: the organisers moved it so the city could concentrate on the Tall Ships visit that July, after the council had floated alternating its festivals from year to year to save money. It returned for five days in April 2026, from the 22nd to the 26th, opening with an installation Reed made with the text artist Robert Montgomery in the Bon Accord Baths. The talks brought in Carlo McCormick for a fireside conversation and Evan Pricco, formerly editor-in-chief of Juxtapoz, in conversation with Montgomery, alongside artist talks from painters including Remi Rough.
Nuart Journal is still published from Stavanger, at two issues a year. Its most recent number is the 2024 issue on the intangible, and it has called for papers on the criminal and the liminal for the one after.