URBAN NATION

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URBAN NATION

URBAN NATION MUSEUM FOR URBAN CONTEMPORARY ART URBAN NATION is the world’s first noncommercial museum-quality institution focusing on urban art. Come visit us!
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URBAN NATION MUSEUM FOR URBAN CONTEMPORARY ART is an international institution for art, creative projects and social exchange. In September 2017, the URBAN NATION museum opened at Bülowstrasse 7 – in central Berlin between the rainbow district on Nollendorfplatz and the new art district around Potsdamer Strasse. The museum presents a unique overall picture of current urban contemporary art from ci

ties around the world thanks to high-calibre, permanent art exhibitions the likes of which have not been seen before. URBAN NATION is the only player in the art world with the objective of giving a home to fleeting and ephemeral street art – urban art – and of documenting the history of this fully fledged artistic movement. In Berlin, urban art is especially significant: it has characterised the city over the last few decades, conveying an international image as an artistic metropolis. That the first urban art museum appeared here of all places is no coincidence. But the museum’s appeal shines out far beyond Berlin. Because urban art is current and global – a democratic, low-threshold art form, interactive and accessible to all, moving all generations and nations, and provoking social dialogue. URBAN NATION is an initiative by Berliner Leben, a foundation of Gewobag. For more information check out our website www.urban-nation.com and follow us on Facebook and Instagram ().

28/05/2026

In the heart of one of Berlin’s most vibrant neighborhoods, URBAN NATION is more than a museum — it’s part of the city’s lively street art culture 🎨✨

Surrounded by independent cafés, late-night bars, galleries, murals, and the energy of Schöneberg’s diverse community, the museum reflects the spirit of the streets
around it: open, creative, expressive, and constantly evolving.

Here, urban contemporary art doesn’t stop at the museum walls. It continues throughout the neighborhood and can be found on facades and corners, as part of conversations, and everyday life of the people living here.

It's a place where art, identity, and community meet. Welcome to URBAN NATION 🖤

🎨 Facade: Lady Pink
📸 Photo: Diana Pǎun

27/05/2026

Chapters in our current exhibition:
🟣 WORD ON THE STREET

What happens when language becomes part of the city itself?

In WORD ON THE STREET, a chapter of our current exhibition LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY, writing, letters, and language take on a new dimension. Letters are more thansymbols here. They turn the city into a living surface for communication, reflection, and exchange. Graffiti typography, poetic interventions, and calligraffiti (a practice that fuses traditional calligraphy with the dynamic power of graffiti) transform the urban landscape.

The central work in this chapter is 'Made of Desires and Fears' by Drew.Lab_One. Combining influences from various calligraphy traditions, the artist creates layered compositions that reflect the architectural and cultural diversity of the city. Reflective mirror elements invite visitors to become part of the work itself.

💌 The city becomes more meaningful through the collective voices of the people who inhabit it. Thus, we invite you to write your own love letter to the city in the comments. Share your thoughts, dreams, and hopes for the urban spaces we share.

🟣 Artist in this chapter:
Drew.Lab_One

📍 URBAN NATION Museum
Bülowstraße 7, 10783 Berlin

📸 Photo: Diana Pǎun

22/05/2026

Buff Monster. Stay Melty (2021)

Buff Monster built his world from the streets up: wheat pastes and stickers in Los Angeles, murals across cities, collectible toys, and fine art editions. Stay Melty is a mid-career survey that expands his earlier 2015 book of the same name, adding six years of work and hundreds of full-color illustrations documenting a practice that never stands still.

An opening essay by New York critic and curator Carlo McCormick frames Buff Monster's pop-inflected imagery as a quiet commentary on impermanence and sentimentality beneath the glossy surface. With his practice, Buff Monster celebrates optimism, humor, and the handmade mark. Design, advertising, and the immediacy of the street are all part of his vocabulary.

The book moves fluidly between process and result: studio sketches, murals mid-construction, sculptures lined up for production. The boundaries between mediums are fluid: murals become prints, trading cards evolve into paintings, street pieces feed back into the gallery. Throughout, his signature pink palette and dripping, smiling characters hold everything together.

The Melty Misfits, his self-produced trading card series inspired by 1980s Garbage Pail Kids packaging show that for Buff Monster, commercial formats are not something to resist but to reclaim and rewire.

Stay Melty reads as a portrait of an artist who has built a cohesive universe from color, character, and craft—and kept his sincerity intact along the way.

📘 Discover the place where street culture, craft, and commerce meet.

📖 Explore this publication at the Martha Cooper Library at URBAN NATION Museum Berlin. Make an appointment and drop by the reading room. More info on our website, link in bio.

You can find the detailed review by Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington of Brooklyn Street Art under https://urban-nation.com/about-us/martha-cooper-library/

📸 Photos:

18/05/2026

Chapters in our current exhibition:

⚫️ LOVE LETTERS IN THE CITY

As part of our current exhibition LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY we also move beyond the museum and directly into Berlin’s neighborhoods.

Together with young people from the area, Lukas Zeilinger of 'Painting Dhaka Project' realized the ONE WALL 'Local Legends: Spandau'. Using 69 names of local residents and places from the neighborhood, in August 2024 the once gray façade of the parking garage was transformed into a vibrant symbol of community and local identity.

The sketch was developed during a workshop with children from the youth club . Often reduced to vandalism, graffiti is actually an important cultural movement that creates spaces for expression, community, and support, especially for young people growing up in socially challenging environments. Art and creativity can foster confidence, identity, and connection, offering a sense of belonging when social circumstances are difficult. The goal was to create a lasting positive experience for the participants, both personally and through the artwork left behind on the wall.

This ONE WALL is made possible thanks to Stiftung Berliner Leben, established by Gewobag in 2013. The foundations program strengthens local structures through art, culture, sports and education.

From the Martha Cooper Library and the Fresh A.I.R. residency program to HipHopHub workshops, supporting a boxing club and different school collaborations these initiatives open spaces for exchange and participation across Berlin.

🎨 ONE WALL 'Local Legends: Spandau'
🧑‍🎨 A Painting Dhaka Project by Lukas Zeilinger
📍 Blasewitzer Ring 12, 13593 Berlin

📸 Photos: Diana Pǎun

13/05/2026

🏙️ Guided Tour: Cityscapes & Communities

As part of the action day “Cohesion in Diversity,” the URBAN NATION Museum invites you to join free guided tours exploring Street Art as an expression of cultural diversity and peaceful social coexistance.

How does urban art shape our cityscapes? And what role does it play for communities around the world?

Cityscapes & Communities – A Tour Through the Global Movement of Street Art

📅 May 21, 2026

🕑 2:00 PM German 🇩🇪
🕝 2:30 PM English 🇬🇧
🕞 3:30 PM German 🇩🇪
🕓 4:00 PM English 🇬🇧

👥 Max. 30 participants per tour

🎟️ Participation is free of charge.

Registration only on-site on the day of the event.

📍 URBAN NATION Museum
Bülowstr. 7
10783 Berlin

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Under the motto ‘Cohesion in Diversity' the German Initiative for Cultural Integration (Initiative kulturelle Integration) is launching its first nationwide day of action on the World Day for Cultural Diversity. The initiative brings together a uniquely broad alliance of representatives from civil society, religious communities, media, social partners, and federal, state, and municipal organizations.

📸 Photo: Diana Pǎun

11/05/2026

🎨 This Sunday, celebrate the International Museum Day with us and dive into the world of urban sketching!

You’ve got a strong idea, but are still looking for your own style? Join Berlin style-writing legends Dejoe and Planet 256 for a special hands-on workshop where graffiti, illustration, and creativity come together.

On the occasion of the International Museum Day, URBAN NATION Museum invites you to be a part of Dejoe’s iconic “Sketch Circle” format. In "Letters & Beats" you’ll be able to experiment with structure and proportion as well as expression and flow.

Planet 256 is known for combining classic graffiti writing with illustration, while Dejoe has gained international recognition for his stylewriting. Following his other passion as a DJ, he’ll also provide the perfect soundtrack while you sketch 🎶

It doesn't matter whether you’re a complete beginner, a seasoned sketcher, coming solo, or bringing family and friends. Everyone is welcome to join, create, and explore their own style.

🎊 International Museum Day
🗓️ May 17, 2026, 2–4 PM
📍 URBAN NATION Museum, Bülowstr. 7, 10783 Berlin

🎟️ Free admission, no registration required

📸 Photo: Stiftung Berliner Leben

08/05/2026

On May 8, we commemorate Germany's Day of Liberation from National Socialism and the people who showed courage when humanity itself was at risk.

In northern Charlottenburg, the Berlin-based artist collective Innerfields has created a powerful ONE WALL as a sign of remembrance. The mural, realized in 2024, honors Dorothee and Harald Poelchau, who helped those persecuted during the N**i regime. The artwork was developed in collaboration with students from Anna-Freud-Schule. Through workshops, they engaged deeply with the couple’s history and contributed their own perspectives to the mural.

At its center are portraits of the Poelchaus and four hands symbolizing protection, closeness, and solidarity. A light represents hope, a menorah remembrance. They are interconnected by a network of lines that reflects resistance.

The project highlights how important it is to keep memory alive, especially for younger generations. The project was made possible through close collaboration between Stiftung Berliner Leben, the Silent Heroes Memorial Center as part of Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand, CultureBuzz - Israel, Anna-Freud-Schule, and Gewobag.

📍Heckerdamm 233, 13627 Berlin

📸 Photos: Ludger Paffrath

05/05/2026

Chapters in our current exhibition:

⚪️ DE-CONSTRUCT TO CONSTRUCT

What if we reimagine deconstruction as a creative force?

In the chapter DE-CONSTRUCT TO CONSTRUCT of our current exhibition LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY, artists rooted in graffiti culture turn overlooked elements of the urban landscape into profound artworks. Fragments, surfaces, and traces of the city are reworked and reimagined, shifting from the ordinary to the emblematic.

Through appropriation and re-appropriation, these works challenge how we see the familiar. What was broken open becomes a new point of entry, changing our view of everyday life.

This chapter invites you to look again; at the city, at its textures, and at what happens when we take something ordinary apart in order to create something completely new.

⚪️ Artists in this chapter:
Liviu Bulea
Johannes Mundinger
Vhils
James Reka
Mare 139
Never2501
MOSES & TAPS™

📍 URBAN NATION Museum
Bülowstraße 7, 10783 Berlin

📸 Photo: Diana Pǎun

02/05/2026

Alison Young. Street Art World (2016)

Criminologist and cultural theorist Alison Young spent two decades walking the laneways and backstreets where street art breathes, in Melbourne, London, New York, and beyond. Street Art World is the result. It is a rigorous yet deeply readable sociocultural study of one of the most visible, contested, and misunderstood forms of contemporary art.

Young combines first-person encounters with interviews, case studies, and photographs, tracing street art from its roots in graffiti writing to its institutional and digital transformations. Her background in criminology and law keeps the analysis sharp, but she writes with the curiosity of an ethnographer.

Seven chapters map the terrain: from the early codes of graffiti culture to the ethics of gallery migration, auction houses, and commodification. In between, she examines how artists construct identities within a system that simultaneously criminalizes and
celebrates them—the midnight installation, the daylight buff.

The closing chapter turns to mediation and memory, considering how digital photography and social media have allowed street art to outlive its physical form.

What sets Street Art World apart from image-driven anthologies is its conceptual scaffolding. Young reads street art not as pathology or spectacle, but as dialogue—between artists, institutions, publics, and the city itself.

📘 A truly comprehensive sociocultural study of street art.

📖 Explore this publication at the Martha Cooper Library at URBAN NATION Museum Berlin. Make an appointment and drop by the reading room. More info on our website, link in bio.

You can find the detailed review by Jaime Rojo and Steven P. Harrington of Brooklyn Street Art at https://urban-nation.com/about-us/martha-cooper-library/

Photos: Stiftung Berliner Leben

27/04/2026

Chapters in our current exhibition:

🟢 SUBVERTED SPACES

Public space is shaped, claimed, and often commercialized.

Our current exhibition Love Letters To The City shows, how artists challenge the dominance of commercial imagery in our everyday surroundings. In the section
SUBVERTED SPACES, they reclaim the city through acts of creative resistance. By intervening in advertising or disrupting familiar visual languages, the works remind us that public spaces should serve the public interest.

Through subvertising—the hijacking of ads for artistic and often satirical purposes—these works turn sites of consumption into moments of reflection. What are we really looking at? Who defines the rules of public space? And how can it be reclaimed?

Come discover for yourself how works by Shepard Fairey, Hogre, and others question the imagery we are confronted with in the city.

🟢 Artists in this chapter:
Jordan Seiler
OX
HOGRE
Rocco and his brothers
Shepard Fairey

LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY
📍 URBAN NATION Museum
Bülowstraße 7, 10783 Berlin

📸 Photo: Diana Pǎun

Adresse

BülowStr. 7
Berlin
10783

Webseite

http://www.urban-nation.com/

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