Join BSA this week in Berlin as we celebrate the opening of “Love Letters to the City,” the new exhibition at Urban Nation Museum. We’ll also be tooling around the city and sharing whatever catches our eye.

“Love Letters to the City is a homage to the city, the idea of the universal city,” curator Michelle Houston reflects while seated at a picnic table outside a Thai restaurant in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood. As final installations are taking place in Urban Nation, Houston’s gazes upward at the new mural on its façade being painted by OG train writer Lady Pink on a cherry picker at the museum. This mural is part of Houston’s upcoming show, “Love Letters to the City.”

“I think paint in public spaces has a different potency in the city than anywhere else,” Houston explains, discussing the exhibition’s outdoor and indoor installations. She highlights the various ways Urban Nation is presenting the evolution of graffiti and street art, noting its role in urbanization, gentrification, and even social conditioning. “It does much more than just present pretty images.”
The museum’s exhibition features a diverse array of works, including full-scale three-dimensional installations and sculptures. A significant portion of the pieces are borrowed from the museum’s permanent collection, while others are newly commissioned from both national and international artists.

Currently, Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara in 1964 in Ecuador, is working on her mural two stories above the bustling street. Her piece, an illustrative and fantastical love letter of her own, features a swirling train reminiscent of the NYC subway trains she became famous for painting in the early 1980s. Her work includes improvisational tags of other iconic figures from that era. In Berlin, where graffiti and street art have transformed entire neighborhoods and established it a magnet for creativity in the public space, her mural is a testament to the city’s rich artistic history.
For Houston, the mural is just one example of “the ingenious ways that artists hack and appropriate public space.”









LOVE LETTERS TO THE CITY AT URBAN NATION MUSEUM BERLIN OPENS TOMORROW FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 13. CLICK HERE FOR SCHEDULES AND EVENTS DETAILS.
Other Articles You May Like from BSA:
Only a year ago, we were in Miami witnessing how a graffiti tower featuring over a hundred international writers and painters transformed the skyline—especially when contrasted against the uninspired...
Phlegm. Wynwood, Miami. (photo © Jaime Rojo) It’s over a year old, but this mural by UK's Phlegm along rail tracks in Miami has a certain timeless quality. Maybe it is the illustrator’s monochroma...
“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.” ― Joseph Fort Newton, Southern Baptist minister from Texas (1876–1950) And yet, talk again turns to the building of a contiguous wall along t...
Bifido in collaboration with Jacoba Niepoort. Calle Libre Festival. Vienna, August 2019. (photo © Bifido) Just below the Vienna U-Bahn, and above the street, there are two new archangels shieldin...
It looks like it is a matter of survival of the fittest for the two women here painted by the Dutch street artist and muralist Judith de Leeuw, whose street moniker is JDL. A vague reference to the b...