The Wende Museum of Culver City

Wende Museum in Culver City

 

Mission

The German word wende (pronounced venda) means transformation in English. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, this is often referred to as an era of uncertainty and possibility.

 

By valuing international scholarship, community engagement, digital access, and broad-ranging experimentation equally, the Wende embraces a spirit of continual transformation.

 

Founded in 2002, the Culver City Wende Museum has the largest collection of Cold War artifacts and artwork, which serve as a foundation for programs that illuminate political and cultural changes in the past, and provide opportunities to understand a changing present, and inspire active participation in personal and social change for a better future.

 

We strive to explore and inspire change through our work at The Wende

 

Collection, preservation, and open access to artwork, artifacts, archives, films, personal histories, and other material associated with socialism during the Cold War (1945-1991);

Promoting rigorous scholarship, educating students, and stimulating general interest by providing lectures, symposia, publications, and digitized collections;

 

At the Wende Museum, there is open storage

There are a wealth of resources to learn about the disappearing cultures, politics, and arts of former East Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, as well as countries with a history of socialism such as China, Vietnam, and North Korea. Wende supports emerging fields of visual and material culture studies, as well as cultural history. It promotes an interdisciplinary study of the Cold War era on a global scale.

 

The collection focuses on:

 

The collection consists of more than half East German materials;

Objects used in everyday life and works of art that reflect lived experiences;

Archival materials documenting Wende Moments, or critical junctures in Cold War history marked by extreme changebeginnings, endings, and transformative events such as the Warsaw Pact's formation, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

 

Historical Witness Project

By collecting, preserving, and sharing life stories from former Eastern Bloc residents, the Wende Museums Historical Witness Project provides insight into life behind the Iron Curtain. As a result of the partnership between Joel Aronowitz and Fiona Chalom, the project offers young generations the opportunity to hear, reflect on, and learn from personal testimonies that illuminate history as lived experience.

 

Events and Public Programs

Throughout the museum's public programming and educational initiatives, people can interpret the past and discover the impact of the Cold War on our world today. A historical lens is used to examine contemporary life and creative expression at the museum, as well as draw parallels between the past and present.

 

Wende Online

It offers a calendar of online programs, including Art Past Present and Cold War Spaces. Aesthetic Space: Artistic Interpretations of Cold War History has been discussed on Cold War Spaces before, as well as Private Space in the Soviet Union, Queer Spaces in East Germany, Community Space: Multimedia Art and African American Community Formation in Los Angeles.

 

There are also Friday Night Films at the Wende and monthly Family Day at the Wende workshops that are offered each month.

 

2014 exhibition at the VDL Research House, competing utopias

During the Cold War era, the Medea Insurrection was the first major exhibition on critical, countercultural, and dissident women artists in Eastern Europe. Originally conceptualized and curated by Susanne Altmann and adapted by the Wende Museum for its location in Culver City, it was originally conceived and curated by Susanne Altmann for the Albertinum (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden).

 

The exhibition Upside-Down Propaganda: The Art of North Korean Defector Sun Mu ran from February 10 to June 2, 2019. There were paintings that were in the style of propaganda posters that satirized North Korean politics.

 

In collaboration with the Wellcome Collection (London), War of Nerves: Psychological Landscapes of the Cold War ran from September 20, 2018 through January 13, 2019. Throughout the exhibition, the Soviet Bloc and the West were explored through mutual suspicion, fear, and mistrust during the Cold War, which was a war of the mind.

 

At 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, you can see ten pieces of the original Berlin Wall

Deconstructing Perestroika (January 28 to May 6). 2012) was an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Culver City which 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.

 

 

 

 

Face the Wall (January 2009-June 2017) reflected on the human impact of the Cold War and the activities, behaviors, and opinions of those who lived through that turbulent time. Through the stories of four individuals, it explored how history is complex, interconnected, and often contradictory.

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