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Wende Museum

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Coordinates: 33°59′27″N 118°22′56″W / 33.9909°N 118.3822°W / 33.9909; -118.3822
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The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War
File:WendeMuseumTriangularLogo-5.jpg
Map
Established2002
Location10808 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230
TypeCultural Museum
DirectorJustinian Jampol
Public transit accessCulver City Bus 3 and Metro Local bus 108 and 358 at Slauson Avenue/Buckingham Parkway
Websitewww.wendemuseum.org

The Wende Museum is an art museum, historical archive of the Cold War, and center for creative community engagement that explores and inspires change.

Mission

Wende (pronounced “venda”) is a German word that translates into English as “transformation.” It commonly refers to the era of uncertainty and possibility leading up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Embracing a spirit of continual transformation as part of its mission, the Wende aspires to reach beyond the conventional walls of a museum, placing equal value on international scholarship, community engagement, digital access, and wide-ranging experimentation.[1]

Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds one of the largest collections of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in personal and social change for a better future.[2]

The Wende fulfills its mission of exploring and inspiring change through

Collections

File:Collections Vault at the Wende Museum.tif
Open Storage at the Wende Museum

The Wende's collections are a resource for learning about the vanishing cultural, political, and artistic histories of the former East Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, as well as countries with a history of socialism including China, Vietnam, and North Korea. The Wende supports emerging fields of aesthetic and academic study in visual and material culture studies as well as cultural history. The museum promotes a multi-layered exploration and discussion of the Cold War era on a global scale.[4]

The comprehensive collection focuses on:

  1. materials originating from East Germany, with more than 50% of the collection from the GDR;
  2. items used in everyday life and artworks capturing lived experience;
  3. materials that document "Wende Moments," or junctures in Cold War history marked by extreme change—beginnings, endings, and transformative events such as the formation of the Warsaw Pact, the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union;
  4. and official and unofficial artwork.[5]

The collection ranges from consumer products (e.g., computers, radios, records, toiletries, foodstuff) to works of modern and contemporary art in all media (e.g., paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphics, photographs), iconic political symbols (e.g., statuary, medals, flags, uniforms, commemorative gifts), and archives—including a substantial gift from East German leader Erich Honecker's estate—and some 3,500 16mm documentary, animation, and educational films as well as home movies from the GDR. The museum contains large collections of furniture, flags and banners, commemorative plates, communist folk art, menus, family albums, and design items. In recent years, the museum has acquired collections of Hungarian Cold War era artworks and artifacts[6], Russian hippie materials from the 1960s and 1970s, Polish solidarity materials, Soviet demilitarization albums, and artifacts from the now-shuttered KGB Espionage Museum.[7]

File:TASCHEN Beyond the Wall.jpg
Beyond the Wall: Art and artifacts from the GDR

The museum's East German collections are the subject of a major publication, Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR/ Jenseits der Mauer. Kunst und Alltagsgegenstände aus der DDR (TASCHEN, 2014).[8] In 2019, TASCHEN published a smaller second edition of the book, The East German Handbook, featuring text in both English and German.[9]

The museum's collections have been exhibited in a number of other museums and institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Imperial War Museum (London),[10] Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum (Independence, MO), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (Simi Valley, CA), Gerald Ford Presidential Library (Ann Arbor, MI), the International Spy Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles).[11]

Historical Witness Project

The Wende Museum’s Historical Witness Project provides insight into life behind the Iron Curtain through the collection, preservation, and sharing of oral histories from people who lived in the former Eastern Bloc. Supported by Joel Aronowitz and Fiona Chalom, the project exists so that both historical witnesses and younger generations can encounter, reflect upon, and learn from personal testimonies that illuminate history as lived experience.[12]

In 2011, The Albanian Human Rights Project deposited its archive at the Wende Museum, including more than 70 filmed interviews with survivors of political persecution in Albania.[13]

Programming Highlights

The museum’s public programming provides resources and opportunities for individuals to interpret the past and to discover the global implications of the Cold War today. The museum uses the Cold War as a lens to examine contemporary life and creative expression, and to draw parallels between the past and the present day.

Ten pieces of the original Berlin Wall at 5900 Wilshire Boulevard

The Wall Project

In 2009, the Wende Museum commemorated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with The Wall Project, the most ambitious commemoration outside of Germany. As part of the event, the museum installed ten original segments of the Berlin Wall in front of 5900 Wilshire Boulevard. It is the longest stretch of the Berlin Wall in the United States.[14] As part of the project, four artists including Los Angeles-based muralist Kent Twitchell and Berlin-based artist Thierry Noir, were invited to paint segments of the wall. On the night of November 8, 2009, a temporary replica of the wall painted by Shepard Fairey, graffiti artists working with ArtStorm, and the general public titled "The Wall Across Wilshire" closed down Wilshire Boulevard, dividing Los Angeles into East and West.[15]

Other ongoing programs include Music at the Wende, the Historical Witness Project, Friday-Night Films at the Wende, and Wende Conversations: A Discussion Series Supported by Susan Horowitz and Rick Feldman.

Highlighted exhibitions

Installation image of Deconstructing Perestroika, 2012
Competing Utopias exhibition at the VDL Research House, 2014

Across/ The Wall was organized in conjunction with the Downtown Los Angeles Art Walk in 2011. The exhibition featured 21 high-resolution reproductions of Soviet era portraits exhibited on the exterior wall of a parking garage.

Deconstructing Perestroika (January 28 - May 6, 2012) was organized in collaboration with the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition featured 24 original, hand-painted poster designs by 13 artists in response to Mikhail Gorbachev's transformative policies of Glasnost and Perestroika in the late 1980s.[16] In 2013, the exhibit traveled to the Natalie and James Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University.

Competing Utopias was organized in collaboration with the Neutra VDL Studio and Residences from July 13 to September 13, 2014. The exhibition was an experimental installation of East German modernist interior design objects from the Wende Museum’s collection within the VDL Research House, an iconic mid-century example of California architecture by Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra.[17][18] Face to Face (June 12, 2015 - September 18, 2015) featured a broad selection of painted and photographed portraits from the Soviet Union, Cold War era Hungary and East Germany, highlighting the diversity within socialist Eastern Europe.[19]

Cold War Spaces (November 19, 2017 - April 29, 2018) was the museum's inaugural exhibition at the Armory site. The exhibition explored Cold War era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union through the physical and ideological spatial relations and divisions of the time.[20][21]

War of Nerves: Psychological Landscapes of the Cold War (September 20 - January 13, 2019) was organized in collaboration with the Wellcome Collection (London). The exhibition looked at the Cold War as “a war of the mind”, exploring the mutual suspicion, fear and mistrust between the Soviet Bloc and the West.[22]

Upside-Down Propaganda: The Art of North Korean Defector Sun Mu (February 10 - June 2, 2019) was the first U.S. museum exhibition of North Korean dissident artist Sun Mu. The exhibition featured paintings in the style of propaganda posters that satirically portrayed the politics of North Korea.[23][24]

File:Wende Museum.jpg
The entrance to the Wende Museum

Site

In November 2012, the City Council of Culver City voted unanimously to approve a 75-year lease of the former United States National Guard Armory building in Culver City as the permanent location of the Wende Museum.[25][26] The Armory building was originally constructed by the National Guard in 1949 as the Cold War began to escalate, and was decommissioned in March 2011. Following renovations, the Wende Museum opened to the public at the Armory site in November 2017.[27] The one-acre campus is designed in a spirit of transparency and open access to Cold War secrets.[28]

References

  1. ^ "About Us | Wende Museum". www.wendemuseum.org. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  2. ^ Facebook; Twitter; options, Show more sharing; Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; Email; URLCopied!, Copy Link; Print (2017-11-16). "The Cold War as a museum: At the Wende, one man's 100,000-piece collection finds a new home". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2021-08-14. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  3. ^ "About Us | Wende Museum". www.wendemuseum.org. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  4. ^ Heller, Steven (2011-08-11). "Cold War Relics: The Wende Museum Saves Communist Design". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  5. ^ "Our Collections | Wende Museum". www.wendemuseum.org. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  6. ^ Kahn, Eve M. (2016-01-07). "A Surge of Interest in East-Bloc Mementos". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  7. ^ Gulyas, Gordon Fairclough And Veronika (2010-12-09). "An Auction for Budapest's Bourgeoisie Puts Lenin on the Communist Block". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  8. ^ Welch, David (2014-12-05). "'DDR Posters' and 'Beyond the Wall'". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  9. ^ Staff, C. N. N. "Behind the Iron Curtain: Vintage designs from communist East Germany". CNN. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  10. ^ "Repainting the Berlin Wall as timely reminder to a new generation". the Guardian. 2019-10-04. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  11. ^ "The Getty Research Institute". Getty Research Institute. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  12. ^ "Historical Witness | Wende Museum". www.wendemuseum.org. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  13. ^ "Albanian Human Rights Project (AHRP) - U.S.-based, non-profit". ahrp. Retrieved 2021-08-14.
  14. ^ "Preserving the Cold War in Sunny California". Public Radio International. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  15. ^ "When the wall tumbled down". Los Angeles Times. 2009-11-06. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  16. ^ "Poster art exhibit recalls end of Soviet era". Los Angeles Times. 2012-02-19. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  17. ^ "West Coast meets Eastern Bloc in 'Competing Utopias' exhibition". Los Angeles Times. 2014-07-10. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  18. ^ "L.A. Designer: A "Collective" Creates "Competing Utopias"". KCRW. 2014-07-09. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  19. ^ Ivanov, Oleg. "The Ideology of the Everyday: The Wende Museum's "Face to Face" Exhibition". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  20. ^ "The Newly Expanded Wende Museum Offers a Nuanced Perspective on the Cold War". Hyperallergic. 2018-04-11. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  21. ^ "Cold War Spaces at the Wende Museum". www.laacollective.org. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  22. ^ Dambrot, Shana Nys (2018-11-06). "The Wende Museum Explores the Art of, and Resistance to, Cold War Brainwashing". LA Weekly. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  23. ^ Stuart, Gwynedd (2019-03-05). "North Korean Defector Sun Mu Is Turning Propaganda Art on Its Head". Los Angeles Magazine. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  24. ^ Tiven, Lucy (2019-02-21). "North Korean Defector Artist Sun Mu's Lost Utopias". Garage. Retrieved 2019-11-01.
  25. ^ "Culver City's Cold War museum is hoping for a victory". Los Angeles Times. 2012-11-11. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  26. ^ "Culver City approves Cold War museum's lease for new home". LA Times Blogs - L.A. NOW. 2012-11-14. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  27. ^ "The Cold War as a museum: At the Wende, one man's 100,000-piece collection finds a new home". Los Angeles Times. 2017-11-16. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
  28. ^ Donath, Jessica (2017-11-13). "Inside a 1940s Armory in Culver City, a Museum Sheds Light on the Cold War". LA Weekly. Retrieved 2019-10-29.
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33°59′27″N 118°22′56″W / 33.9909°N 118.3822°W / 33.9909; -118.3822

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