Current
Encounter subversive art across geographic, ideological, and historical borders in a new exhibition at the Wende Museum. Crumbling Empire: The Power of Dissident Voices will present Russian poster designs of the 1980s and early ’90s, from the Wende's Tom and Jeri Ferris Russian Collection as well as the collection of AIGA San Diego, alongside contemporary American street art by Shepard Fairey and a monumental work by Komar and Melamid
The Wende Museum presents the first U.S. museum exhibition of the North Korean dissident artist Sun Mu. Sun Mu – a pseudonym, meaning “no borders” – fled his country (the last remaining Stalinist state on earth) in 1998. Trained as a propaganda-poster artist, he continues to work in the style in which he once glorified the North Korean army and state leaders, ironically turning propagandistic messages on their heads.
Look up! Looming above Los Angeles are haunting relics of panic and fear. Once distinctly prominent and alarming fixtures in the city, civil-defense air-raid sirens still pepper the vast landscape. Installation began during World War II, but the sirens became prolific symbols of the subsequent Cold War. The formerly intimidating objects erected to warn Angelenos of impending danger have morphed into eerie artifacts of a foregone era. Now deteriorated and defunct, the sirens have become camouflaged within the visual fabric of the modern city and have developed their own unique character and look. By photographing environmental portraits of the sirens, some of which have since been removed, Nicole Weingart has created a comprehensive photographic series of Los Angeles air-raid sirens. This exhibition presents a sample of the diversity of the series.
Organized in collaboration with British-Slovenian media historian Sabina Mihelj and British cultural historian Susan Reid, this exhibition focuses on the impact of Cold War-era television programming in Eastern and Western Europe on private lives.
The exhibition Tito in Africa – Picturing Solidarity, previously displayed at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, documents the strong relationship between the Yugoslav state leader Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980) and African heads of state.
How were people of color represented and perceived in the Soviet Union, which represented itself as a society free of racism? In his conceptual project The Wayland Rudd Collection, artist Yevgeniy Fiks brings together over 200 Soviet images — paintings, movie stills, posters, graphics, and more — of Africans and African Americans, spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s.
Medea: femme fatale and überwoman from the East. In the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East European writers and painters often turned to ancient mythology when they wanted to express their discontent with Communist rule. Their interpretations of mythological figures like Medea, Cassandra, or Penthesilea were crucial in shaping contemporary images for women, and sometimes they were straight-up punk. Organized in collaboration with the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, and guest curator Susanne Altmann.
The series of (mostly) peaceful revolutions that took down the Berlin Wall effectively ended state socialism in Eastern Europe, and brought not just a political but also a material transformation. Countless people who lived through socialism discarded the household and consumer items they had lived with and loved or hated for many years, as they finally had access to higher-standard goods. This exhibition presents the metamorphosis of household and consumer goods from objects of everyday life to items in a museum collection, by way of flea markets, and invites contemporary artists to position them in the here and now.
Proving that photography is no more “objective” than any other medium, two photographers with the same mission offer very different views of East Germany. Through reports published by Stern, unpublished photographs, and documents and photos from the Stasi archives (both photographers were closely monitored by the East German secret police), this exhibition highlights Thomas Höpker and Harald Schmitt’s very different approaches to East German life, culture, and society.
With their colorful surfaces and clear-cut symbols and images, flags and banners are effective carriers of unambiguous messages. At parades, party conventions, and demonstrations they convey a sense of political purpose and group identity. In the communist countries, flags symbolically represented the various organizations, institutions, and collectives that were considered the pillars of society. However, flags and banners can take on other, countercultural meanings as well. In the late 1980s, political dissidents cut out the socialist symbols at the center of the East German, Hungarian, and Romanian national flags. In this exhibition, the Wende Museum’s unique collection of Soviet Bloc flags will be paired with contemporary artwork, showcasing a wide range of uses for this medium.
In the fall of 1981, Bill Aron, the “Dean” of American Jewish photographers, visited the cities of Leningrad, Minsk, and Moscow. In each city, Aron photographed the local synagogue – which served as the common ground for Soviet Jews who were trying to hold on to, or regain, their religious heritage – as well as Jews who wished to leave the country, the so-called refuseniks. He also made striking portraits of the Soviet Jewish population at home and in public life. Aron’s photos will be paired with artist Yevgeniy’s Fiks’s images and artifacts from Birobidzhan, the Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union near the border with China.
In addition to art and artifacts, museums present knowledge, aiming to simultaneously educate and entertain the public. But where do museums get their information from? And how do they turn historical facts into an exhibition narrative? Traversing the minefield of postmodern relativism, on the one hand, and “alternative facts,” on the other, this exhibition explores how “facts” are constructed while aiming to restore the arena for informed interpretation and conversation.
In the 1960s, as decolonization took place across the African continent and the civil rights movement heated up in the United States, Soviet political caricaturists published numerous anti-racist cartoons that captured these global events. This exhibition will feature a selection of these caricatures from the Ne boltai! poster archive in Prague, including original drawings by prominent Soviet caricaturists such as Boris Efimov, the principal political caricaturist for Izvestiia, and Mark Abramov, the principal political caricaturist for Pravda.