Converse Bought the Wall, the Artists Did the Rest

There’s always something slightly uncomfortable about watching a corporation sponsor street art. The wall gets painted, the cameras roll, a hashtag trends briefly, and somewhere a marketing manager files the ROI report. And yet the paint is still real. The art is still there. On a sunny Saturday in early April 2014, Converse staged exactly this kind of event in Berlin, and the artists who showed up—Mike Friedrich, Bene Rohlmann, DXTR—didn’t look like they were performing gratitude for a sponsor. They looked like people who wanted to paint a wall.

The follow-up was more interesting than the main event. A few days later at Mein Haus Am See on Rosenthaler Platz, the Photo Clash turned the whole premise inside out: you submitted a photograph, the artists painted over it with pens and brushes and a lot of color, and handed it back transformed. Your face filtered through someone else’s visual instincts. As a concept it’s more compelling than a mural—more intimate, less billboard and more genuine exchange. Whatever Converse got out of it, the person who walked home with a painted photograph of themselves got something that didn’t exist before that afternoon.

That’s not nothing. Even if the brand paid for it.