Current
The Wende Museum and the Getty Research Institute (GRI) are combining their rich and complementary Hungarian collections to convey the story of Hungary’s visual culture between the 1956 uprising in Budapest and the end of the regime in 1989.
This exhibition is devoted to a world that few people know existed and that many find hard to believe did exist: the world of the Soviet hippie movement. Soviet hippies were part of the global counterculture of the 1960s and 70s: They wanted love and peace – and rock and roll. They maintained an elaborate network all across the Soviet Union. They experimented with homemade drugs. They studied Eastern mysticism and were looking for God. Yet they lived in a state which valued conformity above all else and mercilessly persecuted them for the way they looked and lived.
This exhibition will address the various layers of mutual suspicion, fear and mistrust between the Soviet Bloc and the Western world, and its impact on the lives of everyday people.
Ballet was part of the high drama of the “culture wars,” as the US and USSR jockeyed for position during the Cold War. The Soviet Union produced some of the greatest dancers the world has ever known, with the Bolshoi and Kirov companies as standard bearers. But there were also painful losses, such as the defections of star dancers Nureyev, Makarova, and Baryshnikov, and the stifling of dance innovation during a time of great creativity in the West. How did the culture wars fit into the larger context of Soviet and American ballet, and the place of dance in Soviet life?
Ella Fitzgerald can be heard singing “Someone to Watch Over Me” as multi-colored acrylic plates display shimmering images of migrant children that change depending on the viewer’s perspective. The portraits are drawn from the series Crossing Identities, a public commission by the Berlin Senate, based on German-Turkish artist. Semra Sevin’s interviews and photographs of children of immigrants in Los Angeles and Berlin.
In collaboration with AIGA San Diego, the Wende Museum will display Soviet paintings from the Tom and Jeri Ferris Russian Collection.
Sun Mu, trained by the North Korean army as a propaganda artist, managed to escape in 1998 via China, Laos, and Thailand to South Korea. He uses the officially sanctioned painting style of socialist realism, inspired by propaganda posters from the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, to create images filled with criticism and irony in the style of American Pop Art and Soviet Sots Art. This is the first exhibition of his work in the United States.
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. By photographing environmental portraits of the sirens, 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.