Street Art Cities 2024

The nominees for the Street Art Cities 2024 Awards are heavily biased towards Europe.

Nominees by Continent - Europe/UK 85%, South America 7%, North America 4%, Africa 2%, Asia 2%

Spain, Italy and France combined account for 47% of nominees.

Is this a failure of the nomination process, or just because the SAC user base is larger in Europe, or perhaps it does accurately reflect what you think is the state of world street art?

What can be done to ensure future awards include a better global sample of artworks?

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The ‘best of 2024’ nominations are based on the monthly best of’s. So 1200 nominees over the course of 1 year and with the top 3 automatically qualified, complemented with a couple of wildcards.
It’s true that the majority is Europe based and that’s a bit of a disadvantage.
Nominating has become harder and harder, eventually missing a lot of great art. I don’t have a the perfect view on things happening in Australia and other parts of the world that is.

This is exactly why as of this year, artist can submit their own work for the monthly nominations, the only thing they need to do is to verify their page in order to access this nomination feature. And it will run on our platform instead of me sharing it on IG stories, which is very time consuming to say the least.
I’m expecting a transition phase to start of this new adventure…

The other categories have been selected by our panels.

Just know that it is very disappointing to those of us who put a lot of effort into Street Art Cities, but are outside the area of focus.

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Completely understandable, although I must say that I selected Australian murals numerous times but for some reason they never end up at the top.

But let’s hope that this will improve in the future

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Hello Tim, would there be scope to structure the awards such that the nominations are grouped on a regional basis? For example - Best of Asia/Pacific, Best of the Americas, etc? That way, each region showcases and has winners chosen.

Cheers,
Neda

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Neda, Andrew, best wishes and thank you so much for your response. The Awards is something we all put a lot of time and effort in. We love to do the right thing, so let’s see how we can improve next year.

Firstly, I think bundeling our time and strengths is the key to making this work. I don’t think chopping it up in several awards for several continents works in the bigger picture. But I am not sure. What I am sure of is that the entire workload of prepping and running the awards is more than we thought. Might need some help there next time.

We thought that inviting everyone to do the pre selection and the voting, would be a great way to do it. And we still think it is. However, up until now, the majority of the community is mainly from/based in western Europe. So even though we try to create a level playing field, the field itself is populated with many ‘players’ from the EU/UK.

To broaden the entire community we have been working on inviting community managers to help increase the awareness all over the planet, not just EU/UK. If we all help out a bit, and do that succesfully, the total distribution of active people (hunters, artists, general voters) from different continents will be more balanced in the future.

Please let us know if you would be open to talk about how you could help with that. I know @Streetartwerpenaar and @Stef might have some ideas about it.

On the expert panel; selecting a well balanced team of experts that represent multiple continents was high on our list. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to get in touch with one ozzie who was on our list. So you are totally right there. Good take away for next time; take more time to invite experts from all the continents. Would that be something you would be open to assist in as well?

Lastly: use the current award show to mobilise as much attention as you can for street art. For finding new enthousiasts, people that might want to help out hunting, new artists or new galleries. See the awards as a mechanism to find more likeminded people. We need everybody for the documentation to work, not just the awards.

Anyway, hope this clears things up a bit. Feel free to reply and use this thread for ideas on how to improve going forward. We are in it for the long haul, as you might already know.

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