If you’re looking for street art that your grandmother or college professor will love and support, then I suggest you take them to the city of Leiden in the Netherlands. In 1992 the ‘Poems and Walls’ project, an initiative curated by the Tegen-Beeld Foundation, set out to hand-paint over one-hundred poems on the buildings and bridges throughout the city. The poems, which are always written in their original language, are usually accompanied by a plaque with Dutch and English translations. Some of the poets represented include Rimbaud, Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, Marina Tsvetaeva, e.e. cummings, Pablo Neruda, Sapho, Dylan Thomas, and William Butler Yeats. One of the more obscure poems is written in the Buginese language (spoken in southern Indonesia) on a canal wall near the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.
‘Poems and Walls’ project, Leiden, Netherlands
