BSAF 2016.

The 2016 Brisbane Street Art Festival was the very first edition of what would become one of the city's defining cultural events, and from its opening day it set out to break down barriers between artists and the public. Running from 6 to 14 February 2016, this inaugural festival was built on a simple but ambitious premise: to give street and mural artists genuine showcase opportunities while opening a platform for them to connect with new audiences. Where so much public art had previously existed at the margins, BSAF brought it into the open across the heart of Brisbane, inviting the wider community to participate in an exciting new format rather than simply walk past it.

For a debut, the scale was considerable. The festival spread across more than 25 locations throughout Brisbane, turning walls, laneways and public spaces around the city into an open-air gallery. More than 50 artists took part, working through some 1,400 cans of paint to create work on 25-plus walls. The program reached well beyond the murals themselves, anchored by two exhibitions and rounded out with a street art fashion show alongside a series of evening events. Taken together, this first edition was conceived as a feast for the mind, ears, eyes, body and soul, pairing the act of live painting with the music, performance and social energy that would become hallmarks of the festival in the years to come.

In the arc of the festival, 2016 is the foundation on which everything else was built. The strong community response and support generated by this first outing gave the organisers the momentum to return and expand dramatically in the years that followed, with each edition that followed growing the program further. What began here as a grassroots movement to transform Brisbane's urban landscape would steadily grow into a fixture of the city's cultural calendar and one of Australia's most celebrated public art events. Modest in size by the standards of later years, the inaugural 2016 festival nonetheless established the spirit, ambition and citywide reach that have defined Brisbane Street Art Festival ever since.