Street treasures. J&B x YETS Foundation

The exhibition Street treasures is a unique collaboration between twenty young people from Schiedam, their coaches from the YETS Foundation and the Rotterdam artist collective J&B (Jacob van der Zwan & Bert Frings). J&B capture the archaeology of street culture in their sculptures and video installations. As part of the My Schiedam co-creation programme, J&B worked in close collaboration with young people to explore their street story. They drew inspiration from graffiti, stickers and other symbols they found to create stencils. The collaboration culminated in two large murals depicting the street experiences of young people from the YETS community in J&B’s visual language.

Street murals
Look closely and you will soon start to spot images and stickers on every street you walk down. Young people from the YETS Foundation collaborated with J&B to create an image archive of all kinds of expressions found on the street – some of which are commercial; others are political or territorial. Which stickers appeal to them, and which ones stir something in them? What are the young people of Schiedam interested in? Workshops organised for YETS participants with J&B provided the inspiration for the murals in the Street treasures  exhibition. The young people made a selection of what they saw on the street, based on their own interests. Using the images from these workshops, the young people worked with J&B to create a wall-sized composition. This exhibition is part of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam’s social programme My Schiedam, in which the museum goes out into the neighbourhoods and collaborates with local residents and organisations. Street treasures was co-created with the YETS Foundation, a Schiedam-based organisation dedicated to young people from Schiedam and the surrounding area. Read more about the YETS Foundation here.

J&B artist collective
This process echoes J&B’s way of working, where they consciously seek out street statements in public spaces and combine them into new images. They see the street as a reflection of society in all its banality, beauty and creativity. In installations, sculptures and paintings made using rubbish bags, J&B depict the subconscious of society as it bubbles to the surface in graffiti and stickers on the streets. In Treasures of the street, they present a large mural based on their time spent working with this group of young people, images taken from the street and the many stories that accompany them.

The exhibition is sponsored by: VSBFonds, Vriendenloterij Fund, Fonds 21 and the Mondriaan Fund.