Past
Culled from The Wende Museum collection and curated by William Nickell, Lecturer in Russian at the UC Santa Cruz, this exhibition explored the culture of Soviet public health and collective leisure, focusing on the use of spas and workers clubs to promote political values.
Gero Gandert, German film critic and historian, talked about his run-in with the East German State Secret Police (Stasi). Gandert was arrested by the Stasi, charged with “agitating against the state” and sentenced to three years of solitary confinement. This sentence came after he asked critical questions at a press conference about Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) in 1958, as well as from his writings about the Film Festival in Karlovy Vary for the Ministry for All German Questions.
Co-sponsored by the Villa Aurora and Goethe-Institut, Los Angeles.
The Wende Museum partnered with Taschen and The German American Business Association to host a final celebration ofThe Wall Project and the release of the Museum’s Wall Project Documentary Film. Many of the artists who participated in The Wall Project were in attendance to receive official Certificates of Appreciation from Los Angeles City Councilmember Tom LaBonge and the City of Los Angeles.
The Wende Museum hosted a discussion about the cultural and civic legacies of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in reunified Germany between journalist, activist and writer Daniela Dahn and Joes Segal, Professor of History, University of Ulbrect, Fulbright Senior Researcher and Curator-in-Residence, The Wende Museum.
Co-sponsored by the Fulbright Alumni Association’s Chapter of Greater Los Angeles
The Wende Museum hosted a roundtable discussion of daily life and consumer culture under communism with Justinian Jampol, Executive Director of The Wende Museum and Patrick Patterson, Professor of History, University of California, San Diego. The discussion was moderated by Joes Segal, Professor of History, University of Ulbrect, Senior Fulbright Scholar and The Wende’s Curator-in-Residence.
Sponsored by USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Co-Organized by The Wende Museum, the History and Slavic Languages and Literature Department at USC.
Iconoclash was culled from The Wende Museum’s collections and co-curated by Marion Deshmukh, Professor at George Mason University and Justinian Jampol, Executive Director of The Wende Museum. This exhibition commemorated the events of 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany. It explored the momentous and traumatic changes in Germany reflected in material culture from the 1980s until today.
Fragments refer to what is left behind, broken or has been isolated from lived reality. They reflect the imprint of time and memory. Curated by Justinian Jampol, Executive Director of The Wende Museum and Joes Segal, professor of History, Utrecht University, Fulbright Scholar and Curator-in-Residence, The Wende Museum at The Wende Museum, the exhibitionCollected Fragments conveyed a sense of this fragmentation through the material remnants of East Germany, a culture now lost.
In conjunction with the exhibition Collected Fragments, Katja Zelljadt (Head of Scholars Program, Getty Research Institute), Farrah Karapetian (Artist) and Joes Segal (Professor of History, Utrecht University, Fulbright Scholar and Curator-in-Residence, The Wende Museum) discussed the power of images to destabilize traditional or dominant interpretations of the world by pointing to incongruities or by showing new perspectives. They confronted current interpretations of the past with “disturbing” objects and broken biographies.
Moderated by Cristina Cuevas-Wolf, Manager of Collection Development, The Wende Museum.
This festive event brought together the organizers, artists, sponsors and individual donors whose collective generosity and vision made The Wall Project possible. City of Los Angeles Councilmember Tom LaBonge and Justinian Jampol, Executive Director of The Wende Museum, presided over the evening’s activities which included a performance by renowned chanteuse Ute Lemper, a DJ set by artist Shepard Fairey and a silent auction.
As part of its Wall Project, and in collaboration with LMU, The Wende Museum presented a discussion with the L.A.-based muralist Kent Twitchell, Berlin Wall muralist Thierry Noir, L.A. graffiti artist Timoi, and Steve Bagish, founder and director of ArtStorm. Moderated by Carolyn Peter, director and curator of LMU’s Laband Art Gallery, the panelists shared their experiences working in the realm of public art. The discussion explored why these artists were drawn to create art in public spaces where politics, legal issues, scale and the weather all play a role in the creative process. Whether they were painting on the Berlin Wall, the side of an L.A. freeway or at Venice Beach, these artists have grappled with the temporality of their work in shifting urban and political landscapes.
Thierry Noir, one of the first artists to paint on the Berlin Wall, joined Justinian Jampol, director of The Wende Museum, in a conversation about his experiences in Berlin as he painted the Wall in the 1980s and his plans for the segments of the Wall in Los Angeles.
Support provided by the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles
The Wende Museum and German Historical Institute presented a three-day international conference, bringing together more than 30 scholars, journalists and observers from throughout Europe and the U.S. to question the role of “things,” namely objects of material culture and their importance for the understanding of German history, since the Wende era in 1989 and 1990. The conference papers focused on three areas of research: 1) the function of things in everyday life of East and West Germans; 2) the history of culture as an instrument of power; and 3) contemporary museum practices as indicators of the politics of writing about and visualizing history.
In conjunction with the Wall Project, The Wende Museum's civic commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, former U.S. Ambassador to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) Richard Barkley, Consul Michael Ott and dramaturge Uta Schorlemmer discussed the dramatic events leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent final days of the GDR. Richard Barkley served as the last American Ambassador to the GDR from 1988 to 1990, before the reunification of Germany. Michael Ott is Consul of Cultural Affairs for the General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Los Angeles. Uta Schorlemmer is the daughter of the famous Wittenberg pastor and dissident in GDR, Frederick Schorlemmer.
Moderated by Gregory Rodriguez, Irvine Senior Fellow and director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation. Support provided by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, UCLA.
This multi-day film series, organized in collaboration with DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, focused on films made just as the Berlin Wall collapsed and East Germany began to crumble. It showcased thirteen feature films and five documentaries made by the last generation of filmmakers trained in the German Democratic Republic.