They come in the guise of the night, armed with spray cans, rollers, and stencils, and within a few minutes in complete darkness they put incredible images on formerly empty walls. Impressive as those murals may seem, in the end they are not favored by everyone, raising the eternal questions of "whose street is it anyway?"
This stereotype about street art may be true in many cases, but is not necessarily the norm, especially when it comes to the most spectacular murals. Take those ginormous wall paintings on the end walls of many houses in Berlin. The ones where the architect assumed the next house could be built... but then wasn't. Using that huge wall as a canvas requires a coordinated, daytime effort, and ultimately may be quite family friendly.
Kids Are Everywhere!
So you may have heard the statistic about Germany having one of the lowest birthrates worldwide, if not THE lowest at the moment. Whether it's true or not, it's certainly not what you can see in Berlin, where crying babies, children in bike trailers, KiTa groups on playgrounds, and parents pushing "kinderwagons" is the norm everywhere. So it should not be surprising to a mural featuring children... in precisely the activity of painting walls.
Such is the case exactly on the wall of this large house in the Schinkestraße, near the Kottbusser Damm, in the district of Kreuzberg. (Though it is the district of Prenzlauer Berg that is often called Pregnancy Hill, Kreuzberg is not far behind in terms of kids.) It's the image of an artist (maybe even a self portrait) with roller in hand, carrying a young assistant on his shoulder, who seems to be also eager to use the huge pain brush in her tiny hands. It is quite appropriate that the mural faces a playground, and is covered with streaks and splatters, possibly created by actual children.
Being well prepared for the onslaught of other street artist who are not equipped to access the upper area of his art, the muralist put his identifying mark into the top right corner. There we can see that he is Case Maclaim, and following the link will reveal that this piece is titled The Future Is Female. This post is my entry to this week's CCC's Street Art Contest #139. To see more amazing murals in Berlin, take a look at my Walls of Berlin collection.