Street art NFT exhibition to launch in physical showroom in Riga

A brick-and-mortar showroom in the Latvian city will host an exhibition of nonfungible tokens.

A physical showroom for nonfungible tokens is set to open in Riga, Latvia, where NFTs of street art from around the globe will be put on display. The gallery is being launched by Kiwie 1001, an NFT project born from the Latvian street art collective of the same name.

Submissions are open to anyone who wishes to enter, and pieces can be submitted via the project’s Discord channel. Winning pieces will be voted on by the Kiwie 1001 community and will be presented in the Riga gallery when it opens in June.

Street art and NFTs might seem like a strange pairing, particularly given the reluctance by street artists to engage with the commercial side of the art industry. Yet displaying it as NFTs actually solves one problem that accompanies the presentation of street art — namely, how do you show it to someone without breaking down the wall it’s spray-painted on?

Minting the pieces as NFTs on a blockchain might seem like a lot of work when a photograph would suffice, but the lead business strategist at Kiwie 1001, Kristaps Vaivods, said hosting the tokens in a physical location would also help spread awareness of NFTs while allowing artists to get noticed.

“While NFTs have quickly jumped into the mainstream, there is still a lot more work left to be done to inform the public on their benefits and applications,” said Vaivods.

“We’ve launched the NFT showroom to help other artists get noticed and spread awareness of this new artistic revolution. NFTs open many doors in terms of creative ways of defining ownership where it used to be impractical, and they allow smaller artists to make a living without necessarily catering to large collectors,” Vaivods added.