The Museum of Freedom

All over the world people are trying to figure out how to preserve the work of street artists. There are galleries that collect and display their work, and there are museums specializing in tours of local graffiti, but only in Russia is there an institution with a permanent address and a permanent collection.

And it is not afraid to call itself the Street Art Museum.

St. Petersburg’s Street Art Museum (SAM) is located on Revolution Highway, far from the city center and its well-known tourist attractions. It is run by a private organization and operates in an industrial site, sharing space with a functioning factory. This is because SAM is the brainchild of Andrei Zaitsev, the son of the factory’s director, Dmitry Zaitsev.

“I’ve done a lot of traveling, and although I keep looking, I’ve never found anything like this,” Andrei said. “Something similar opened up in Berlin this spring, Urban Nation, but it’s not exclusively devoted to street art, it was a little different. And they’ve only just opened, while we’re on our fourth exhibition. And, since I didn’t have any examples to follow, we’ve been inventing our museum as we go, feeling our way through. For some people that might be sacrilege, but for us it’s the blazing of a new trail in the world of street art and art in general.”

Since the late 1950s, the factory has been producing the decorative laminate that covers the interiors of trains and elevators, that gives kitchen furniture its stain-proof sheen. And while part of the factory site has been redesigned to suit the museum’s purposes, the manufacturing areas and exhibition space overlap, creating a unique atmosphere and nicely replicating a typical setting where one might find graffiti.

The only item in the museum’s collection brought in from the outside is a work by the late Pasha 183, a renowned genius of street art also known as P183. It is the image from the iconic wrapper of the familiar Alyonka chocolate bar – a symbol of the Soviet candy industry – painted on an 18-square-meter pavement panel. This work of art had been gradually deteriorating on Losiny Ostrov (Elk Island), a national park in Moscow, until SAM ventured to transport the 4.5-ton artwork to St. Petersburg.

The rest of the museum’s art has been specially created for it. Zaitsev managed to recruit all of the best-known artists and has assembled a collection that includes several pieces by renowned foreigners, but the museum’s primary focus is contemporary Russian street art. One symbol of the museum is a work by Muscovite Kirill Kto (“kto” is the Russian word for “who”). Kto is best known in Moscow for his striking use of color in the various graffiti words of wisdom he has painted all over Russia’s capital. For the museum, he made a work of art out of something one factory worker said in response to a colleague’s praise for the museum’s graffiti: “Sometimes, yes, and sometimes it’s some sort of nonsense” («Иногда да, а иногда какая-то ерунда»).

Russia’s art community has had a similarly skeptical reaction. SAM has been called “the artistic redevelopment of an industrial territory,” but it has also been criticized for lacking a coherent concept and scholarly approach.

“The phrase ‘street art museum’ is, of course, absurd, and perhaps they were a bit hasty in choosing that name,” said Igor Ponosov, an artist and author of the first Russian-language book about the history of street art, “although from the standpoint of PR it was a good move. They would do well to hold a scholarly yet accessible exhibition that would recount the history of street art. For now, it’s just a bunch of spontaneously collected works. They do one project after another, but there’s no true museum team, although recently I was asked to develop the concept for a future permanent exhibit. If they follow that path, then maybe they really will become a museum.”

For now, SAM is organized around large-scale annual projects: the museum invites dozens of artists from around the world and has them adorn the factory with temporary works that will be painted over the following year. The first exhibition, which opened at the height of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, was titled “Casus Pacis” (a case for peace) and was a civic statement by the museum’s owners that brought together the works of dozens of Russian and Ukrainian artists.

SAM’s current project, in keeping with its lofty mission, is devoted to the 100th anniversary of Russia’s revolution, a milestone no self-respecting museum can ignore. Fifty artists from 12 countries are participating.* The exhibition’s centerpiece is a work by the Russian group, AES + F, which has given one of the complex’s main buildings the façade of the Hermitage, the palace famously stormed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.

“All the posters say that the exhibition was timed to coincide with the revolution’s centennial, but I didn’t want to use the word ‘revolution’ in the name,” Zaitsev explained. “By using the name ‘Brighter Days Are Coming’ I was trying to express only a sense, so that there would still be questions and it wouldn’t be clear – was this a threat or the promise of a sweet life? For me, the revolution was somewhat like a bloody carnival, and I wanted to emphasize that this holiday touches everyone, and each person should answer the question of whether or not they need it.”

The organizers emphasize that the exhibition is dedicated not only to the events of 1917, but also to revolution “in the broad sense of the word,” whether rebellions in other countries, the sexual revolution, avant-garde art – anything at all, including street art.

“In general, we try to stay out of politics and not take radical stances on either side,” Zaitsev said. Here he is echoing a formulation that has by now grown hackneyed in Russia and often reflects loyalty to the government and a reluctance to step on their toes. But Zaitsev insists that the only dictates his curators have to follow is their own artistic taste.

“I didn’t have the impression that they were self-censoring in any way or anything of the sort,” said Ponosov. “During the last exhibition, for example, my American friend and colleague Brad Downey and I created a room for them with objects made of invented Russian-American flags. We also minted our own made-up coins, which was not easy, since workshops suspected counterfeiting and refused to take our orders.

“All this could fall under laws against insulting state symbols, and their lawyers were afraid to open the exhibit. But Andrei stood his ground. That’s what I like about SAM. In many other places, street art has become purely decorative and has been deprived of any social message, but here they at least encourage the reflection of important themes. The fact that the artists themselves don’t always have anything to say is a separate problem – a problem for street art all over the world. Street art as an independent phenomenon is dying; it’s not what it used to be. Maybe that’s exactly why it makes sense to create a museum that would interpret and study street art.”

It is worth mentioning that SAM opened at a time when the appearance of Russian cities was being radically transformed by all manner of murals, especially in Moscow, but also in St. Petersburg. The authorities have been trying to quash all manifestations of freedom and protest – and graffiti is certainly an expression of freedom. Even those works that do not disappear the next day fade into a backdrop of fake street art that is now overtaking the capital. This includes decorative works by invited artists, advertising murals, and patriotic state-sponsored art.

In this context, SAM has paradoxically become an oasis for street art in Russia, a museum that shows its visitors what freedom used to look like. RL