Everybody Loves the Mural. Nobody Asks How It Got There.
Updated: 21 hours ago
On invisible cultural labour, disappearing museums and who gets to decide what becomes heritage
There is a wonderful photograph in a local newspaper this week. Television presenter Hugo Hoes stands proudly in a once-neglected pedestrian tunnel in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, in front of a colourful mural by Mr. Juice. The tunnel looks magnificent. The presenter looks delighted. A popular local talk show is back for a new season.
The artist is named. The presenter is named. The photographer is named. Even the tunnel gets a mention.
What isn't in the picture is how the mural came to exist. That, I think, is where the real story begins.
The museum that is disappearing
For fourteen years, Street Art Museum Amsterdam has tried to take the museum outside its walls. We wanted people to stop thinking of culture as something an institution hands them, and start experiencing it as their own.
Then something rather amusing happened. We succeeded.
Our artworks became meeting points, neighbourhood landmarks, backdrops for selfies and settings for local television. The museum entered public life so completely that it became invisible. Everybody enjoys the culture. Nobody remembers the institution.
I'm not complaining about this. It is, more or less, what we asked for. But there is a difference between wanting recognition and demanding ownership. SAMA does not need its name painted across every wall. What matters is recognising the professional labour, responsibility and infrastructure that made the wall possible. Because when that work becomes invisible, so does the question of who should support it. Can a museum succeed in making culture belong to everyone without making itself financially disposable?
What doesn't photograph
Murals do not appear because someone has a good idea and a bucket of paint.
Take this tunnel. It started in 2019. SAMA was one of fourteen partners in a Europe for Citizens project on street art as a tool for connection and inclusion, and we hosted its fourth and final meeting. Twenty-six representatives arrived in Nieuw-West for an opening dinner at café Buiten. On the way to their hotel, we walked them through this tunnel, and everyone posed for photos against its “ugly graffiti”. We were cool by association: we represented its younger sibling. At that moment I knew we were going to paint this place. It took five more years. In 2022, SAMA and four European partners decided to work together.
In 2024, our project Street Art for the Future won €400,000 from Erasmus+ to build a free toolkit for youth workers and volunteers who use non-formal learning.
Part of the grant paid for two pilot murals. One would be made by a professional artist, to show the social sector how to make room for artistic vision. The other would be made by course participants with young people, putting the toolkit into practice. The results would then travel to a week-long exchange in Lisbon. The tunnel became the professional Pilot. We heard it was “up for grabs” through the Nationaal Programma Nieuw-West's neighbourhood rounds, and at a Dichtersbuurt partners' meeting, EigenWijks suggested it for our pilot. Another art foundation also had plans for the wall, but with SAMA already rooted in the area, it made more sense for us to take it on. The location mattered too. The tunnel connects the better-heeled side, known locally as Noorderhof, with the less affluent Dichtersbuurt, a neighbourhood in the middle of demolition and renewal, where SAMA has spent years building community spirit. Permissions were easy, thanks to the renovations. The hardest negotiation was an ironic one: convincing the permissions expert not to insist on an anti-graffiti coating. It would have cost half the artist's fee, while removing a tag means one van ride from Purmerend. I prefer to pay the artist. I still have to sign the formal contract with Mr. Juice, which is funny in itself. In graffiti, going formal used to mean you were out. With public money, everyone is learning.
Mr. Juice had forgotten the tunnel's sides in his original sketch, so I gave him the freedom to work from what he noticed each day. During MBO culture week, I brought a group of MBO students, mostly 17-year-old girls, on a tour of our collection that ended with an artist at work. Mr. Juice challenged them to choose what went on one corner of the tunnel. Out of two ideas, they picked a girl lying in the grass, reading a book. She now peacefully reads her book on the Dichtersbuurt side.
About 70% of the money came from Erasmus+, counting the wider programme without which none of this would exist. The other 30% came from local government and the neighbourhood network: OASE, EigenWijks, Philadelphia, De Dichter and Groene Kans. Above all, they brought the people. The boldest part of the plan was the youth collaboration. Our partner Vooruit set out to bring fifteen young people from across the city into a European programme: young people whose youth work usually amounts to a couple of hours a week. It was a brave ambition, and European paperwork has a way of humbling everyone, SAMA very much included.
Then came the day itself. The tent frame arrived; its plastic cover did not. Three students spent three hours finding their way across the city. By the time everyone was there, the schedule had quietly given up, so we did the only sensible thing. We sat under the bridge together and simply enjoyed each other's company. It became one of the best moments of the whole project.
And when the Vooruit and municipal colleagues came home from the week in Lisbon, they brought back knowledge, experience and, above all, inspiration. Non-formal learning worked. We turned frustration into inspiration.
None of this photographs well. A meeting about permissions will never make the front page. A spreadsheet of European project outcomes attracts no applause. And a community worker who spends months building trust is rarely called the creator of a landmark. Yet remove that invisible infrastructure and the beautiful wall never exists. This is not a complaint about who gets the credit. It is a question of accountability. When public institutions celebrate the outcomes of community-led cultural work, do they also recognise the organisations that carry the responsibility, manage the risks, build the relationships and make those outcomes possible? And what happens to the next generation of projects when those organisations can no longer afford to exist?
Participation is not a spectator sport
Last week at MuseumNext's Creative Museums Summit, I argued that museums may not need more visitors. They may need to become more curious about the people who already hold the knowledge they are trying to collect.
Someone in the audience asked how to avoid participation fatigue in communities that institutions constantly ask for their stories. It's the right question. We invite people to workshops, consultations and co-creation sessions. We ask what they think and remember. We thank them for their valuable contributions. Then we go back to making the decisions.
Not every process works like this. But the risk is familiar: participation becomes a refined way of collecting community knowledge without sharing the authority to interpret it or act on it. Citizen science suggests something harder. Residents can be producers of knowledge, not just sources of it. A teenager may know something about a wall that a heritage specialist does not. And a resident's dislike of an artwork may matter as much as an art historian's admiration.
Looking, valuing, deciding
In a recent ErfgoedAcademie session, we asked heritage professionals to look at an artwork, name its social value and decide who should have a say in its future. We kept those three steps deliberately apart, because they are not the same thing. You can admire a work without grasping its significance. You can grasp its significance without wanting to keep it. And you can want to keep it without having the authority to decide. Street art makes this especially awkward. Heritage frameworks are built for continuity: buildings survive, monuments are protected, collections are catalogued. Street art refuses to cooperate. It appears without permission, gets tagged, fades and disappears. More than 300 works have passed through SAMA's collection since 2012, and many no longer exist. Their value did not vanish with the paint. Sometimes the wall goes and the story survives.
Take Safety, painted by the Argentine artist Alaniz on the facade of an Amsterdam apartment block in 2013. It was demolished in 2017. Physically, all that remains is half a brick in our collection and a video. Then, this year, an email arrived. An author writing a book called The Spiritual Meaning Hidden in Chinese Characters wanted to use Safety in it, and asked us to help him reach the artist. Nine years after the wall came down, the mural is finding a new life in a book none of us could have imagined, on a subject none of us had connected it to. Half a brick could never have told us that. Notice, too, where he wrote. Not to the building's owner, and not to the municipality, but to the museum. Even a collection that has vanished from the streets keeps a forwarding address.
The neighbourhood also answers back. Recently, a message appeared on the bridge opposite the tunnel. Neat black capitals, a tag, and a rather charming cat. It was not a compliment, though it was beautifully lettered. The gist, translated from the original Amsterdam, was that someone does not care for our fresh paint, and cares even less for whoever applied it. Very little was lost in translation, and nothing at all was left to the imagination.
Notice what the writer did not do. He did not go over Mr. Juice. He chose the wall across the way, and in doing so turned a tag into a reply. When I forwarded the photos to Mr. Juice, he said he would cover it the next day. I told him no. This is a dialogue. As far as I can tell, the insult has two possible addressees. Perhaps it is me: the woman who smothered a perfectly good graffiti wall in expensive paint, like a hostess who redecorates the hall and then wonders why the old crowd no longer drops by. Or perhaps it is Mr. Juice: the writer who went respectable, with a plaque, a tidy white frame and a wall fit for a talk show. Nothing ruins a reputation quite like a commission. Both readings are fair. Both now belong to the work. And I love it. One so rarely receives criticism in such a legible hand.
A living collection does not stay politely silent. Sometimes it writes on the opposite wall. And community participation is not the same as community agreement. In November, at the Monumentencongres, we'll put two works side by side: one beautiful and easy to admire, one provocative and possibly offensive. Participants will vote, argue and perhaps change their minds. The goal is not consensus. It is to find out what the disagreement reveals.
Documentation is a political act
At MuseumNext, another participant asked what role young people play in deciding what enters our Digital Street Art Depot, and how it is described. That question goes to the heart of it. If we document street art only in the language of institutions, we may save the image and lose its meaning. Every archive records choices: what was noticed, what was considered important, whose voice was kept and whose was left out. Documentation is a political act. Even when it looks like a spreadsheet. Especially when it looks like a spreadsheet.
The curious economics of visibility
Our cultural system funds processes, measures outcomes and celebrates products. Then it tends to forget the people who connected the three.
The artist is recognised for the artwork. The politician is recognised for supporting culture. The media gets content. The neighbourhood gets a beautiful place. And the organisation that made the collaboration possible goes back to writing funding applications explaining why its work matters. Again. Perhaps illustrated with the very mural everyone else is now using to show how well the neighbourhood is doing.
Public value does not automatically become institutional sustainability. A mural may generate pride, media attention, social connections and even economic activity. Yet none of these benefits automatically pays for the organisation that brought everyone together. We have become remarkably good at funding cultural projects and remarkably reluctant to invest in the organisations that make them possible. We pay for the painting, the workshop and the final report. But who pays for the years of relationships, negotiations, learning and accumulated knowledge that make the next project possible?
This is not simply a funding problem. It is a structural problem in how we value cultural work. We reward visible outcomes while treating the infrastructure behind them as an endlessly renewable resource.
So here is one practical proposal, and it is not bigger logos on walls.
Every publicly commissioned artwork should include a budget for documenting how it came about: the conversations, objections, permissions, people and decisions.
That record should be public and searchable, alongside the finished artwork. But documentation is only the beginning. The expertise and infrastructure that produce public value also deserve long-term investment. We reward visible outcomes while treating the infrastructure behind them as an endlessly renewable resource.
For Nieuw-West, I would go further. The district deserves a street art strategy, and I would like to help build it on four foundations:
Know what we have. SAMA's collection here is large but scarcely documented. It needs proper due diligence: what exists, what has gone, and what is known about each work.
Use the places in transition. Areas facing demolition could become playgrounds for graffiti jams, in the spirit of Bijlmer Boogie. Industrial sites such as Sloterdijk have a role too. SAMA itself began with a vision of an open-air museum among the Sloterdijk pillars.
Remember together. Across Slotermeer and Geuzenveld, many cultural activities, performances and community initiatives have developed around artworks SAMA helped create, preserve or bring into public life — including works that no longer exist. Each adds another layer to the neighbourhood's cultural memory. We should document not only the artwork, but the people, relationships and disagreements that give it meaning. Participatory heritage evaluation deserves proper time, professional expertise and funding, rather than being squeezed into the gaps between project applications.
Invest in the infrastructure, not just the next mural. SAMA has developed four substantial resources with the potential to travel beyond Amsterdam: the Digital Street Art Depot, a toolkit for youth workers, a participatory evaluation methodology, and a street art map for visitors. Together, they represent years of experimentation, practical experience and accumulated knowledge. Their next challenge is not another pilot. It is professionalisation: turning proven methods into transferable services, training, partnerships and sustainable income. That requires dedicated people, technical development and investment. Otherwise, we risk funding innovation repeatedly while never allowing it to become sustainable.
Outside the frame
I genuinely love that photograph. A neglected passage has become a place worth celebrating, and the artwork has entered the visual language of Nieuw-West.
In one sense, it is exactly what we hoped for. There is one more detail I only noticed when I read the interview properly. Hugo Hoes heard that a mural was being painted, went to look, and found Mr. Juice at work, with everyone walking past going “oh” and “ah”. And his talk show is held at café Buiten, on the Sloterplas. It is the same café where, in 2019, twenty-six European guests sat down to our opening dinner, before we walked them to their hotel through a tunnel full of “ugly graffiti”. Seven years later, the show from that café has its photograph taken in the same tunnel. Nobody planned it. The circle simply closed. And only someone who was there at the beginning could see it.
But it also shows how fragile cultural memory is. The finished work is visible; the process that made it is not. If we don't record that process, future generations may know what the wall looked like but not why it mattered.
That is why our work increasingly means collecting not only artworks but the circumstances of their existence: the conversations, the disagreements, the shared meals, the people who made things happen and the people who said no. Heritage is not just what survives. It is also what we choose to remember about how things came to be. So the next time you admire a mural, ask who painted it. Then ask who invited the artist, who worked with the residents, who disagreed, and who will still be there when the paint begins to fade.
Everybody loves the mural. We would love them to know how it got there, and one day, to help decide what happens to it next.
