One of the world’s first museums dedicated to street art opened in Berlin on 16 September, showing works by artists including Shepard Fairey, Vhils and the duo Herakut. The Urban Nation Museum for Urban Contemporary Art will host one exhibition a year and is partly funded by a €1m grant and a €400,000 interest-free loan from the Berlin lottery foundation. Housed in a five-storey former apartment block in the Schöneberg district, the museum combines 1,500 sq. m of exhibition space with workshops, archives and a library. The US photographer Martha Cooper, who documented the birth of the New York graffiti scene in the 1970s, has agreed to give the museum a significant part of her book collection. The displays will continue outdoors: the façade is clad with removable panels that will become part of the permanent collection and a 300-metre-long open-air gallery is planned for the opening.
