Anindya Sen in Conversation with Street Art Museum Amsterdam Founder, Anna Stolyarova

Before Anna founded Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA) in 2012, she worked in advertising as a Senior Digital Production Director creating campaigns for brands like Philips and Western Union. During her travels, she visited many museums and found that she was overwhelmed by the larger ones but found a connection with smaller museums like The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and The Beyeler Foundation in Basel.  At the same time, her work, which involved artistic direction and design, brought her in touch with Graffiti and Street Art. Anna lived in a suburban Amsterdam neighbourhood that had mainly social housing and immigrant housing. There, she set up SAMA along the route where she walked her dog with the desire of using this new form of art to change the perception of her neighbourhood. The museum has come a long way since its inception and was listed on Google Art & Culture as one of the ‘Hidden Gems’ among museums in 2020. Anindya Sen speaks to Anna about how she has been steering her museum through this difficult year, its recent and ongoing projects and its plans for the future.

Anindya Sen: 2020 was a tough year for museums. How did the pandemic affect you in terms of both visitor flow and finances? Did being an open-air museum located in the suburbs have benefits on the flip side?

Anna Stolyarova: For us, the immediate impact was the cancellation of group bus tours that were an important source of visitors and revenues. At the beginning of 2020, you could not park a bus in the city centre in Amsterdam and everyone in the city was complaining about too many tourists. In contrast, when you visited us in the suburbs, you could park your bus conveniently, take a tour, have lunch and explore the neighbourhood – that was our attraction. Because of that, for the first time, we were beginning to taste financial independence (from the government). That’s when the pandemic hit. By April people got tired of lockdown and self-isolation. Because our collection is outside, we once again became an attraction. What was different this time was that we attracted a wave of local people. Since we were normally geared towards French, German and other international tourists, welcoming locals (who prefer to speak and read in Dutch) presented its own set of challenges. We had to make changes to our guides – to the maps, tables, explanations and directions (related to the artworks) because the Dutch tend to like to do things on their own, without a guide. They want to read things. We had to restructure everything we do towards that shift.

Visitors experiencing ‘Glory’ by Pez and Recal during the pandemic (July 2020)

Anindya: What about your new projects planned last year? How did you navigate them through the pandemic and the lockdowns?

Anna:  Among other projects, we had received funding to produce a digital podcast about the history of our museum in eight chapters. I was inspired by Julian Barnes’ book ‘The History of the World in 10 ½ chapters’ and how he explores Noah’s Ark through the eyes of a woodworm. We decided to record it through the eyes of a water rat because in the suburbs we have a lot of rats and rat is a play on the word art as well! We got the funding because the agency started encouraging any form of digital content that supports culture. Now we are doing it in Dutch for the local audience with students from the local college.  It is up to them to explore the heritage of where they live and for us to guide them.

We also received money to make the programming about kids in the neighbourhood of the museum during the summer. It was so successful that we had people coming from all over the city to our suburbs just for this program. We would do urban art and graffiti workshops which involved an hour of education followed by one and a half hours of fun – for example learning about calligraphy and colour schemes, followed by painting actual graffiti on a wall.

‘Midzomer Mokum’, Artist Ben de Boef (NL) conducting series of workshops for local kids during the pandemic (July-Aug 2020)

‘Midzomer Mokum’, Artist Ben de Boef (NL) conducting series of workshops for local kids during the pandemic (July-Aug 2020) 

For us, the pandemic had this positive impact – we received funding to engage with our local community.  But we also had to adapt our team – hire people who [could speak] Dutch, we had to let go of a few researchers and we brought in project managers, people who can do more workshops, urban music, spoken word…[in other words], more action-oriented roles rather than just research and collection registration.

‘Midzomer Mokum’, Artist Ben de Boef (NL) conducting series of workshops for local kids during the pandemic (July-Aug 2020)

Anindya: Tell us about your partnership with Google Art and Culture which has linked up with more than 2000 museums globally including yours to make their collections accessible online. How has the relationship evolved over time and how does it benefit a museum like yours?

Anna: I started working with Google Arts & Culture very early in 2014 as a way to have my entire collection online in sync with my vision of an eco-museum. They are completely free and they provide you with personalised support. More recently, they released a new way of working which is storytelling driven. So, in the last two years, we have registered this new swipe through format where the images tell you things.

When we recently did our exhibition, The Magic Dozen based on our first publication of the top 12 artists, we could not receive people for physical visits. It was really sad because it had taken us a year to find funding, another six months to get funded and a lot of effort to design and execute an exhibition between three locations. So, I approached Google and asked them if there was a way to put an exhibition online and as it turned out they were just about to launch this immersive feature so it was a perfect match. There was a lot of support from their side with guidance, workshops, feedback and editing and the final outcome has been wonderful. People with VR headsets can actually visit the three locations for an immersive VR experience. You also have the Google Street view feature – so on one of the walls you can see live and you can zoom in and out. The exhibition mounted on Google Art & Culture works equally well on a phone or a tablet. The text is complimentary but sufficient to give you an idea of what is going on.

That is why I am excited whenever I get an email from them. Because I know they are doing some experiment or they have launched something new and want to involve us. It is also a compliment and a big motivational factor for us to work with them because it tells me that our content is wanted.

Anindya: Given the ephemeral nature of street art, most of your collection will wear away with time and ultimately be demolished. How are you using technology to overcome this?

’Magic Dozen’ Exhibition, VR Experience (July 2020)

Anna: Within a maximum of five years, most of our works will disappear.

For me, I ultimately visualise my museum as a digital sac de voyage …a tiny box where my collection is in a USB stick. This is a museum that you can buy in a gift shop and take home – a registered fully documented collection of whatever pieces we have (by April 2022 it will be 500 in total, all of them will have a name and recording only digitally). The second tool will be the digital podcast on the history of the collection recorded by 14–18 year-olds talking about the heritage of their neighbourhood through our artworks. I plan for my visitors to be able to put on a pair of VR glasses and travel 22 metres up from the ground and not only see the artist paint but also get a feel of the neighbourhood – a full 360 degree feel. I would like to have in the box an AR feature where you can paint on the wall. We are focusing on finding a way to get us into Amsterdam Historical Museum, Stedjelik and the City Archive. All these museums are interested in helping us digitise the collection properly and getting us into the city’s [historical record].

The wall may be ephemeral but collective memory and digital imagery around is not. So, through a combination of podcasts, VR storytelling, AR features, libraries in the digital format, photographs and collective memory we hope to overcome the ephemeral nature of our works.

‘On the Corner of Our Street’ by Spanish artist Kenor (Artwork made in 2020, photographed in 2021)

Anindya: Every year, the MA students from our Sotheby’s Institute visit SAMA along with their study trip to TEFAF. Due to the pandemic, they are not able to do the same this year. What would you like to tell them about Street Art and the SAMA experience that sets it apart from a regular museum visit so that they can look forward to visiting soon?

’Magic Dozen’ Exhibition, Spectacle Opening, artwork by Colombian artist Stinkfish (July 2020)

Anna: The first part is exploring the collection and the neighbourhood. You [physically] move when you visit the collection, which can be around a three-kilometre walk. Many people come back, either because it is too much in one go or to see what has changed. I really love when that happens because then over time they develop a relationship with our neighbourhood and they discover their favourite spots. We are very multi-cultural with a significant number of immigrants from Turkey and Morocco and more recent inflows from African countries like Burundi and Eritrea. So, along with the street art, you can enjoy street food from across the world, like from the middle east, fried fish in all varieties of Andalusian style, and experience Turkish food. We even have a beautiful European café next to the lake. In a normal museum, you cannot take your dog or enjoy the painting with a drink in hand, whereas [with us] you can enjoy street art more freely, which I think matters more for younger generations.

What also makes our museum different is the authenticity of the experience. Unlike the heavily restored Rembrandts or Vermeers in the traditional museums, in our case, people can see the aging process. There is a beautiful book published by Whitechapel gallery called ‘Ruins’. It’s about the whole romantic notion of decay that gives you goosebumps along with the thrill that you do not get in a static environment, which makes it special. 

’Memories’ by Colombian artist Bastardilla, (Artwork made in 2019, photograph taken in 2019)

‘Curiosity’ by Spanish artist SUSO33 (Artwork made in 2015, Photograph taken in 2020)

Finally, you see our art as it co-exists with nature. We have one artwork called Curiosity by the Madrid graffiti legend, SUSO33 which I made him paint behind a tree! In the beginning he did not like it; then I explained to him that the artwork will be seen in winter when all the leaves are gone and the artwork is fully revealed. For the rest of the year, you wait and you watch how the tree interacts with the work. Now he says it is one of his favourites! Street art is ‘alive’ art. It changes with the seasons; it decays and it dies (when demolished). It can come across as happy or sad and you can witness all of it!

Thank you, Anna!

All Images Courtesy of Street Art Museum Amsterdam (SAMA)

You can follow updates from SAMA on their website, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

Anindya Sen,

Contributor, MADE IN BED