A museum for street art in Berlin

For its first few years Urban Nation had no rooms of its own. The project began in 2013 as an initiative of Stiftung Berliner Leben, a non-profit foundation set up by the Berlin housing company Gewobag, and it worked on borrowed surfaces. Artists were invited to paint large murals across the city under the name One Wall. Another regular venue was the shop window of a furniture store at Bülowstraße 7 in Schöneberg, where the Project M series handed the frontage to a new curator each round. That same building is now the Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, which opened in September 2017.

A building for work that does not last

The museum’s own account of why it exists starts from the problem every street artist knows. Work in public space gets rained on, buffed, painted over, damaged or taken, and for many artists that impermanence is part of the idea. A museum dedicated to such work has to decide what it is keeping and why.

The building was planned for three years and rebuilt over one, to a design by the Berlin architects GRAFT. The ceiling between the ground and first floors was removed to make one tall exhibition space, and visitors cross it on bridges running parallel to Bülowstraße and the elevated U-Bahn line outside, so the walls can be seen from a distance and close up. The floor is asphalt, a deliberate link between the rooms and the street. Above the galleries, more than 1,100 square metres on the top three floors hold studio flats for the Fresh A.I.R. residency, with room for eleven artists.

The facade is the part most people notice first. It is made of panels that artists paint and that can later be taken down and archived, so the outside of the building changes while what comes off it joins the holdings. When the Museums Association’s journal reviewed the opening in 2018, the museum’s creative director Yasha Young described that system as its way of letting artists work on the front while still keeping what they made.

Made for the museum

The museum’s page on its own history answers the obvious worry directly. For the opening exhibition, UNique. UNited. UNstoppable., and for its successor in 2019, no existing works were taken from the street. Most of what hung was made specially, either for those shows or in one of Urban Nation’s other projects around the city. The museum did not strip walls to fill its own.

The Museums Association review counted more than 150 works in the opening hang and a collection of over 250 pieces. It also reported more than 13,000 people at the open-air programme on the opening weekend, with skateboarding and breakdance outside, and noted that admission was free.

The third exhibition, in 2020, went the other way and looked back. It was given to the photographs of Martha Cooper, whose pictures of New York trains and the people painting them from the 1970s onwards are some of the earliest records the movement has. A camera was the way the museum brought the street indoors without taking anything from it.

The library

That show led to something more permanent. In November 2021 Cooper came to Berlin, together with Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington of Brooklyn Street Art, the curators of the 2015 Project M round, and opened the Martha Cooper Library inside the museum. It grew from her donation and loans of publications and archive material, and it collects writing since 1960 on graffiti and street art, and on the urban art that grew out of them. Style writing in the American tradition is at the heart of it, from Philadelphia and New York onwards, alongside fanzines, graffiti magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, monographs, and some rare titles that no other library in Berlin holds. Anyone over eighteen can register and use the reading room, on the second floor by appointment, on two days a week.

What it shows now

The exhibitions have kept testing the same question from different sides. Love Letters to the City, curated by Michelle Houston, opened in September 2024 and looked at how public art shapes shared urban life, pointing visitors back out into the streets around the building. Further along the same street, at the Project Space at Bülowstraße 97, The Urban Skin pairs the Italian artist Pietro Ruffo with the German artist Jan Bauer until 18 October 2026, treating walls, facades and ruins as surfaces that carry history. Its curators, Janine Arndt and Chiara Zampetti Egidi, present it as a show about the wall itself more than the image painted on it, which is close to the problem the museum was built around.