USA TODAY International Edition
Street art finds a home in Berlin museum
For decades, street art has been inscribed deeply into Berlin’s cultural DNA. West Berliners would scrawl messages of resistance along the Wall in the 1980s, and, after reunification, creative thinkers unleashed their spray paint cans onto the city’s bombed-out buildings. The ubiquitous tags draped along the streets of the German capital earned Berlin a reputation as the world’s graffiti mecca and today, millions flock to the city’s biggest street art attractions, including the East Side Gallery where roughly 100 murals cover the longest existing stretch of the former wall.
Now, a new museum offers street and urban art lovers another reason to visit. The Museum for Urban Contemporary Art opened in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood in September, through the combined efforts of the foundation Berliner Leben and gallerist Yasha Young, who started Urban Nation to champion street and public art worldwide. They renovated the museum space with the help of a 1 million euro grant from the Berlin Lotto Foundation.
But this isn’t a museum adorned in the illegal scribbles and graffiti. The walls house some of the best examples of urban contemporary art from around the globe.
Urban art has exploded in popularity as corporations, advertisers and even politicians have latched onto the ultracool aesthetic happening on the streets. The American artist Shepard Fairey famously designed Barack Obama’s Hope campaign posters; Coca-Cola commissioned Brazil’s street art maven Speto for their 2014 FIFA branding. The museum chronicles the work that has been floating around walls and billboards, showing how the art form has evolved since its early days in the 1970s to now include digital works, hyperrealistic paintings, sculpture and more.
“I wanted to give urban contemporary art an archive where one could actually research the history much longer and much later. We’re not trying to ride a wave — this project was 10 years in the making,” said Young, the director and curator of Urban Nation.
Walking through the doors of the hulking 19th-century building on Bülowstrasse 7, guests come face-to-face with Fairey’s Revolution Girl mural, bursting in red and black tones. Even more colors explode along the white walls of the sprawling museum, which includes two floors of exhibition space connected by British artist Ben Eine’s rainbow staircases. A blue Amazon warrior — Brazilian artist Cranio’s signature character— guards the lower floor of the museum while American artist El Mac’s portrait The Fighter raises his chin defiantly at viewers in another room.
Young worked with eight curators to select 100 artists whose work is on display. For her, the museum was also an opportunity to raise the profile of these artists and preserve their work in a permanent collection.
“We wanted to elevate work that isn’t necessarily considered by many people to be art, and give the artists an institutional foundation and make them part of a museum collection,” she said.
Young made it a point to have creativity spilling out into the streets. The building’s façade is made up of panels that will display murals, and the museum has commissioned artists to create works in the surrounding blocks of Schöneberg, once home to David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Marlene Dietrich.
And for visitors who want to continue exploring the city’s street art traditions, the East Side Gallery is a half hour U-bahn ride from the museum. In Mitte, a small entrance just off of Hackescher Markt leads into winding alleys brimming with sky-high murals.
“After the war, the city has constantly tried to find itself and continues to do so, and when a city does that, it offers great potential for creative minds and creative talent,” Young explained.
“This is just one side of it all — these artist won’t give up working on the streets, but we’ve provided a very wellthought out environment that exposes people to the practice. There’s a lot brewing out there, and this is just the beginning.”