30/11/2025
POETRY IS IN THE STREETS
APR 23-26. 2026
‘World’s first’ for acclaimed Nuart Aberdeen as it reveals text and poetry-based artworks will transform the city centre next spring.
Nuart Aberdeen has announced it will return with a world’s first for a street art festival by exploring text and poetry-based art on the theme of “Poetry Is In The Streets”.
Globally-renowned street artists will have the cityscape as a blank canvas for this innovative and visionary take on Nuart, running from Thursday, April 23, to Sunday, April 26, staged by Aberdeen Inspired in partnership with Aberdeen City Council.
At the same time as announcing the Nuart Aberdeen theme, Aberdeen Inspired is inviting companies and organisations to sponsor the acclaimed event, which has been named as one of the top six street art festivals in the world.
The return of the hugely-popular festival in the spring will still see a mix of large-scale murals and more intimate works appearing on walls and spaces across the city all with text or poetry at their heart.
Martyn Reed, of Reed Productions, Nuart Aberdeen’s curator, said: “Text lends itself very well to scaling up, the message can be as large and colourful as any other mural, so the ‘splash of colour’ to lift areas of the city will stay in place.”
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Niels 'Shoe' Meulman’s creation on the former Atholl House at Wapping Street. Image - Courtesy of Brian Tallman
There are already several striking text-based Nuart Aberdeen works from previous festivals, including Robert Montgomery’s stunning mural at Jopps Lane and the legendary Niels 'Shoe' Meulman’s creation on the former Atholl House at Wapping Street.
Martyn said Poetry Is In The Streets is a translation of the French slogan "la poésie est dans la rue" and is often used to suggest poetry can be found in everyday life and culture, something Nuart has been committed to since its inception.
He said: “There are two main facets to the theme, one is the idea that ‘poetry’ is for books and academia, and that art is for galleries and museums. Poetry Is In The Streets, highlights that it’s in the ‘streets’ where the content for poetry and art lives. That you can see and experience and reflect on it as you go about your day to day.
“I’ve also noticed a shift on social media and digital culture, where text is very much processed as ‘image’ these days. Rarely does as image appear without a text overlay and often, text alone is posted as image, as a jpeg. It’s an interesting shift that we thought worth exploring.”
