Persons of Interest: Brooklyn Street Art at Urban Nation, Berlin
For the seventh round of Urban Nation's Project M in Berlin, the two founders of Brooklyn Street Art asked a dozen New York artists to research and paint someone with German roots.
Urban Nation, the Berlin foundation that was then preparing a museum for urban contemporary art on Bülowstraße in Schöneberg, ran a rolling series called Project M, handing its building’s facade and windows to a different curator each time. The seventh instalment, Persons of Interest, opened in mid-March 2015 and was curated by Steven P. Harrington and Jaime Rojo, the pair behind the Brooklyn Street Art website. They explained the thinking behind it shortly after the opening.
An answer to the parachute mural
Harrington said the show had a pointed aim. The big international mural festivals had drawn a recurring complaint: a travelling group of famous names flies into a city, paints, and leaves behind work that means little to the people who live there. The curators wanted the opposite, pieces that Berliners would recognise as being about them.
Rojo described the brief. Each of the twelve artists was asked to research and portray a person who had lived in Germany, or a German living in Brooklyn. The idea also nodded to a long exchange between artists in the two cities, which both curators knew at first hand. They were delighted, Rojo said, that the artists had chosen figures they felt a personal link with: realist painters and Dadaists, social and political campaigners, a writer and poet, a film star, Turkish immigrants, and in one case a German photographer who happened to be the artist’s neighbour in Brooklyn. Cake, for example, chose the printmaker Käthe Kollwitz.
Choosing the twelve
A portrait brief narrowed the field, Harrington said, but plenty of people were doing strong figurative work, so the selection still took care. They wanted a spread of approaches to the street. Rojo listed what they ended up with: stencil artists, a paper cutter, muralists, a conceptual artist, a folk-style spray painter, several one-time graffiti writers and paste-up artists, some trained at art school and some self-taught. The Brooklyn group included Swoon, Gaia, Dain, Don Rimx, Specter, Chris Stain, Esteban del Valle, NohJColey, El Sol 25, Icy and Sot, and Cake.
A week in Berlin
Both men enjoyed the work. Rojo credited careful planning and long familiarity with the invited artists for a notably cooperative mood, even with an unfamiliar city, language and set of materials. Harrington thought the sheer quantity of graffiti across Berlin’s buildings charged the atmosphere, and he praised Yasha Young and the Urban Nation team for their organisation. The group also filmed a music video after breaking into the museum space at night.
Harrington recalled that his and Rojo’s Williamsburg collective had swapped shows with a collective in Berlin’s Wedding district in the early 2000s, so they arrived expecting kindred spirits. Within a couple of hours of landing, Rojo was cycling round walls with the duo Various and Gould.
Two of the people portrayed came to the opening. The Afro-German writer and activist Katharina Oguntoye met NohJColey, who had painted her. Fereshta Ludin, the teacher whose right to wear a headscarf in class had gone to Germany’s Constitutional Court more than a decade earlier, met Gaia, who had painted her. Her visit came a day after the same court published a ruling against blanket headscarf bans for teachers, which gave the evening an unplanned topicality. Rojo also listed the artists and friends who called in during the week, among them David Walker, Strøk, Reka, Herakut, Case Maclaim, Vermibus, Mark Rigney, NeverCrew and Dave the Chimp.