Deconstructing Perestroika

In collaboration with the Craft and Folk Art Museum and the Thompson Art Gallery at San Jose State University, the Wende Museum presents Deconstructing Perestroika, the first major exhibition in the United States of hand-painted Soviet-era political posters that were inspired by a new government policy of transparency in the former Soviet Union. Organized to mark the twentieth anniversary of the former superpower’s demise in December 1991, this exhibition highlights some of the key political and cultural shifts that defined the era and ultimately led to the fall of the superpower, namely Mikhail Gorbachev’s transformative policies of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These posters illustrate the tradition of hand-painted poster design, known in Russian as avtorskii plakat, which is an outgrowth of traditional Soviet agitprop. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Ljiljana Grubisic, director of collections and public programs at the Wende Museum.

Read the press release here.