The anniversary edition Artown NOW #5 returns to Ploiești this year between September 18 and October 4. At just 10 years old, Matei Nițulescu is the co-curator of the Urban Art Annual.
Artown NOW, the only urban art annual in Romania, announces its fifth edition, which will take place in Ploiești between September 18 and October 4, 2026, under the theme “The Grammar of Freedom.” The public is invited, at the beginning of autumn, to discover the city on foot through the lens of art. Murals, sculptures, urban installations, workshops, and events will transform Ploiești into an open-air museum, and the community is expected at workshops, exhibitions, and events at Fabrica UZUC. Between August 24 and September 12, Fabrica UZUC becomes a temporary museum, with artists from all corners of the world transforming the industrial platform into an artistic construction site open to the public.
Artown NOW, the urban art annual, is a declaration about how art shapes the city, the community, and the present. This year’s edition brings to Ploiești over 100 local and international artists, who will create 25 murals and sculptures, plus another 50 street interventions throughout the entire city.
Over four editions, the event has brought to Ploiești over 400 artists from 40 countries, across 6 continents, in front of over 15,000 visitors in 2025 alone. With 100 murals completed to date, 2 parks restored, over 350 interventions in public space, and 11,000 sqm painted, Ploiești is becoming the unofficial capital of urban art in Romania. The mural map can be explored at artown-now.ro/map.
The only urban art annual in Romania, with a manifesto theme
This year’s edition proposes the theme “The Grammar of Freedom.” In a fragmented world, where freedom is often reduced to personal comfort or isolation, the event assumes a necessary moment: to question what freedom means today, where it begins and where its boundaries lie. Through murals, sculptures, installations, street interventions, and exhibitions, the city becomes a space for encounter and reflection on freedom, understood as an experience built through the relationship with others, with the community, and with the surrounding environment. Each intervention invites the public to presence, dialogue, and participation.
This year’s theme completes a five-year curatorial arc: after previous editions proposed that the city feel, speak, imagine, and belong, the anniversary edition manifests itself through the verb that encompasses them all to be.
In a context where democracies are vulnerable, Artown NOW 2026 aims to map, alongside artists, curators, the community, the private sector, and public administrations, a possible grammar of freedom, and at the end of the edition an open manual will be created a set of questions, gestures, and practices that can be carried forward in the city, in the community, and in civic life.
“Five years after the first edition, Ploiești has become the place where street art earns its legitimacy, gesture by gesture. We do not stop at decorating the city we want to build, together with artists and the community, a space where freedom is practiced, not just discussed,” declared Livia Florea, founder of Artown NOW.
Fabrica UZUC becomes a (CONtra)TEMPORARY Museum
Fabrica UZUC, with a history of over 120 years, built across 100,000 sqm, is the only industrial site in Romania remodeled through art at this scale. Between August 24 and September 12, 2026, artists work on the platform, transforming the halls into an open artistic construction site. Unlike a classic exhibition, here the process is the exhibition itself and can be followed in real time: the public has access during the production period, and the completed works will be presented starting September 18. The Urban Zone of Unconventional Culture project, a project co-financed by the National Cultural Fund Administration, pursues the transformation of the factory into a (CONtra)TEMPORARY Museum a museum in which art is produced in the presence of the community.
The edition extends beyond UZUC as well: Parcul Democrației receives new sculptural installations inspired by Brâncuși, and Gara de Sud in Ploiești, the only train station in Romania refurbished through art, receives new artistic interventions.
A 10-year-old co-curator
This year’s edition brings to the curatorial team Matei Nițulescu, a 10-year-old passionate about culture, already with experience in theatre and performance, as well as in producing an artistic interview show with artists. Curious and sensitive, he is the ideal co-curator to shape the theme of freedom at this age. He will lead guided tours and will be the voice of community events within the annual.
Three extended weekends, just 45 minutes from Bucharest
What the 2026 edition brings:
Continuous Studio artist Dumitru Gorzo moves his studio into a Fabrica UZUC hall for a month and a half, opening the artistic process to the public, with weekly events, talks, and workshops; murals, sculptures, and interventions in public space, created by artists from Romania and abroad throughout the entire city; guided tours, workshops, music, concerts, recitals, DJ sets, discussion panels, theatre, performance, listening sessions, and short film screenings; public program from Thursday to Sunday, with every Sunday dedicated to the community; The Grammar of Freedom Manual, the edition’s manifesto publication.
Access to all events of the edition is free.
