A few thoughts while sitting in the airport lounge, leaving the week of Nuart Aberdeen with a renewed sense of where street art can evolve. Martyn Reed, Nuart’s founder, came up with the concept of “Poetry In the Streets” for the 2026 edition, and there was a sense that poetry has always been at the heart of the festival’s 25-year run in both Norway and now Scotland. The way the festival works is a way to intervene in public space with some sort of respite and break, to now fill a city with directions, advertisements, rules and regulations, but to give space to something more collective and thoughtful. Meaningful. Street art at its best is an intervention for you, the viewer, in and amongst the day-to-day hustle that we tend to occupy. Poetry, sort of relegated to the outskirts of art, changes the way you think about the limitations of language; it opens it up to something different. Street art, graffiti, public art, should do the same.
So what did poetry do this year as a companion to public art practice? Does text work in this context, because we are already dealing with the onslaught of butchered language and the 21st century digital and AI dismantling of common communication. I think Nuart hit the mark here. Not just because Scotland is such a heartland of poetry, but because the artist’s themselves really embarked on a journey of how text can be used not just as subtle jabs to the authority of civic politics, but also to quieter and more profound uses of language as empathic and compassionate connections.
I got stopped on Reed’s essay on Nuart this year, and this idea: “As curators, researchers and producers working in ‘festival”’culture, we have a responsibility to not only showcase and celebrate the most interesting and technically competent works of our time, but to also ensure the culture’s development and survival. The only way to do this, is to inspire and encourage those without the privilege of a fine art degree or access to the arts, to have a go themselves. This has always been Nuart’s primary goal, not just to produce art, but to also inspire and produce the next generation of artists.”
And that next generation of artists can also be creators of language and not just a visual identity now. I think connecting street art with more historical and connecting practices is where Nuart excels, and in the past, it was through painters, academics and other cultural practitioners of the street art ethos. I think this year, Nuart made it about something bigger, really focusing on what the umbrella above street art and graffit is. And it is, simply, the poetry of the people. —Evan Pricco
