After much ado, but we won’t get further into that, the hotly anticipated Straat Museum finally opened its doors in Amsterdam‘s Northern Docklands earlier this month. Occupying a voluminous 7,000 sqm. (75,347 sq.ft.) hangar built in 1952, it’s a listed industrial structure which is part of a large shipyard complex, and the generous dimensions have automatically led to the claim of being the planet’s biggest museum dedicated to street art. On Sat – Oct 17 (invite only), the venue’s in-house gallery will be inaugurated with a special solo exhibition by Niels Shoe Meulman (1967), a seasoned Dutch graffiti artist with a global following and who’s widely regarded as the godfather of the graffiti scene in the Netherlands. Irreverently entitled What the fuck?, the show presents 33 key works spanning more than a decade of highlights from the Meulman’s prolific career, from his hallmark Calligraffiti style, to his more recent zen-like action painting and abstract works. Additionally, there’s an installation called Shoe In The Middle to be seen in a dedicated space on the ground floor which is a continuation of the artist’s earlier themes Unidenticals and Unambidextrous. It incorporates murals painted with fire extinguishers, larger-than-life curtain paintings, and a painted wall built from 1,500 copies of Shoe’s coffee table book Shoe Is My Middle Name. In celebration of the show, Straat Museum and Meulman will also release a limited edition screen print entitled The Difference, featuring an ambigram of graffiti lettering, done in street art stencil technique.
Straat Museum
NDSM Plein 1
1033WC Amsterdam
Telephone: +31 20 3709630
Tue-Thu 10-6
Fri 10-9
Sat-Sun 10-6
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
