From New York to Amsterdam: STRAAT Museum shows graffiti culture through the eyes of Henry Chalfant

Previously unpublished work and an extensive public programme accompany ART IS NOT A CRIME

Amsterdam, 7 October 2026

On October 9, 2026, STRAAT Museum opens ART IS NOT A CRIME. Henry Chalfant: Capturing graffiti culture, NYC, 1977–1987. The exhibition brings the archive of American photographer and documentary maker Henry Chalfant (b. 1940) to Amsterdam. Chalfant made graffiti visible far beyond New York, and his work has never before been shown in the Netherlands on this scale. Visitors wait for the painted subway trains to pull in, as if they were standing on a platform in the Bronx. Footprints on the floor show how Chalfant photographed the cars section by section. The exhibition runs until 13 March 2027, with talks, guided tours, family activities and late openings on Thursdays.

Waiting for the train
ART IS NOT A CRIME is set in late-1970s New York: a city in crisis, where young people transformed old subway trains into rolling works of art. In the video installation Limited Exhibition Time, life-size painted trains pull in on an LED wall, stand still for a few seconds and disappear again. Visitors can take a seat on replicas of the Writers' Bench: the benches at 149th Street–Grand Concourse station in the Bronx, where graffiti writers watched their work roll by.

Ten years at a glance
More than five hundred photographs of complete subway trains, taken over ten years, together form a wall more than 25 metres long. Close up, you see each train separately; take a step back and the photographs merge into a single wall. There are also life-size reproductions of painted subway trains, from a single name to a fully painted car. They show how big these works were, and how much effort it took to make them in a single night.

In Chalfant's footsteps
Whenever a writer had painted a new piece on a train, Henry Chalfant would get a message on his answering machine: which line, which car. He had to act fast, before the Transit Authority cleaned the train. His 35mm camera could not capture an entire train in one shot, so he took a series of overlapping photographs. Back home, he pasted the prints together by hand. The footprints on the exhibition floor trace his route: each footprint stands for one click of his camera.

From boombox to video cycle
A boombox plays cassette recordings of DJ Red Alert's radio show, which Chalfant recorded himself at the time and has kept all these years. Display cases with sketchbooks, flyers, newspaper cuttings and spray cans show how graffiti spread before the internet existed. Also on display are the books Subway Art (1984) and Spraycan Art (1987), which writers around the world call 'the bible'. In a video cycle featuring excerpts from his documentaries, Chalfant himself talks about the trains, the writers and why he kept looking when the rest of the city looked away.

Henry's Gaze
Three hundred photographs, most of them previously unpublished, show Europe as well as New York. Chalfant toured Europe in the mid-1980s to present Style Wars and Subway Art. Some of the photographs carry his handwritten notes: who is in them, where they were taken and what they show.

The Amsterdam story
In 1984, Chalfant exhibited his photographs at the Yaki Kornblit gallery on Willemsparkweg in Amsterdam-Zuid. There, a small group of local teenagers saw for the first time what graffiti in New York really looked like. With the limited means available at the time, photographs of the exhibition were taken, copied and passed around among young people in Amsterdam. Through a growing network of graffiti writers, the images also reached other European cities. In this way, Amsterdam played an important role in the emergence of graffiti culture outside the United States. More than forty years later, Chalfant's work returns to the city. In the exhibition, guest curator Dutch Graffiti Library shows how the Netherlands first encountered his images, and what the first generation of Dutch writers did with them.

STRAAT by NIGHT: open until 21:00 on Thursdays
From 15 October, STRAAT Museum is open every Thursday until 21:00. In the evening, the warehouse is atmospherically lit and the painted subway trains roll past in the dark. An evening ticket costs €15 (€8 for young people aged 13 to 18). It is valid from 17:00 and gives access to the museum and all of the evening's activities. Free 30-minute quick tours start at 18:00 and 18:45.

Guided tours
Every Saturday and Sunday at 15:00 there is a free 60-minute guided tour of ART IS NOT A CRIME.

Saturday talks
Once a month, STRAAT Museum invites a guest to reflect on ART IS NOT A CRIME from their own perspective. The talk series 'Through the eyes of …' covers topics including fashion, photography, street style and (graffiti) writing. The talks take place at 14:00 on 17 October, 14 November and 12 December 2026, and on 16 January, 13 February and 13 March 2027. Each talk lasts around 45 minutes, is held in English and is free with a valid museum ticket.

The first guests are:
17 October: Lynnée Denise, DJ Scholarship, writer and multidisciplinary artist
14 November: Edson Sabajo, co-founder of Patta
12 December: Florian Gaag, director of Wholetrain (2006), including a screening of the film

Museum Night
On 7 November 2026, STRAAT takes part in Amsterdam's Museum Night (Museumnacht), with a program dedicated entirely to ART IS NOT A CRIME. From 19:00 to 02:00, the museum hosts a range of activities, including graffiti and breakdance workshops, short 'Through the eyes of …' talks with various guests, art engagers and freestyle showcases by ISH Dance Collective. DJ Too Martian spins old-school hip-hop. Tickets are available exclusively via museumnacht.amsterdam.

For all ages
Explore the exhibition through a treasure hunt, or design your own graffiti letters at the drawing table: everyone can join in. Every Sunday from 14:00 to 16:00 there is a drop-in creative activity for young and old. During the autumn school holiday (10 to 18 October 2026), it also takes place on Wednesdays and Fridays from 11:00 to 13:00. All these activities are free of charge. For up-to-date information on all activities, visit straatmuseum.com.

ART IS NOT A CRIME is curated by SUSO33 and made possible in part by the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK), with financial support from the Embassy of Spain in the Netherlands (@spainculturenl).

About Henry Chalfant
Henry Chalfant (United States, 1940) came to New York as a sculptor in the 1970s and began photographing the city's painted subway trains. As an engaged outsider, he earned the trust of the scene. He made the documentary Style Wars (1983) with Tony Silver, the books Subway Art (1984) with Martha Cooper, and Spraycan Art (1987) with James Prigoff. His work is held in the collections of, among others, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Carnegie Institute and the Groninger Museum.

About STRAAT Museum
STRAAT Museum is the leading museum for street art and graffiti, housed in a monumental warehouse of approximately 8,000 m² on the NDSM site in Amsterdam. The museum presents more than 180 large-scale works by artists from the Netherlands and abroad. In addition to showcasing monumental artworks, STRAAT highlights the background, stories, and developments within street art and graffiti culture.

Click here to download the press release and images.