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The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive in Culver City, California.
Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds one of the largest collections of art and artifacts from the Cold War era.
Programming highlights at the Wende Museum, the Wende’s Glorya Kaufman Community Center, and online include
In 2024, the Wende participated in Getty’s PST Art: Art and Science Collide with the exhibition Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency. The Wende also participated in Getty’s PST Art Climate Impact Program.
The collection ranges from consumer products (e.g., , , records, toiletries, foodstuff) to works of Modern art and contemporary art in all media (e.g., , , , graphics, ), iconic political symbols (e.g., statuary, , , , commemorative gifts), and archives—including a substantial gift from East German leader Erich Honecker's estate—and some 3,500 16mm Documentary film, animation, and as well as home movies from the GDR. The museum contains large collections of furniture, flags and , commemorative plates, communist folk art, menus, family albums, and design items. In recent years, the museum has acquired significant collections related to Soviet Jewry and the Refusenik movement, Hungary Cold War era artworks and artifacts, hippie materials from the 1960s and 1970s, Polish Solidarity materials, Soviet Demilitarisation albums, and artifacts from the now-shuttered KGB Espionage Museum. The Wende also holds significant oral history collections, including the Wende’s own Historical Witness Project and the archive of the Albanian Human Rights Project.
The museum's East German collections are the subject of the books, Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR/ Jenseits der Mauer. Kunst und Alltagsgegenstände aus der DDR (Taschen, 2014) and The East German Handbook (TASCHEN, 2019) .
The museum's collections have been exhibited in a number of other museums and institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Prada Foundation (Milan), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), Imperial War Museum (London), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum (Independence, MO), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (Simi Valley, CA), Gerald Ford Presidential Library (Ann Arbor, MI), and the International Spy Museum (Washington, D.C.).
The museum was housed for more than a decade in an office park. In November 2012, the City Council of Culver City voted unanimously to approve a 75-year lease of the former United States National Guard Armory building on Culver Boulevard as the permanent location of the Wende Museum. The Armory building was originally constructed in 1949 as the Cold War began to escalate, and was decommissioned in March 2011. Following renovations, the Wende Museum opened to the public at the Armory site in November 2017, designed in a spirit of transparency.
The Wende's one-acre campus includes the Wende Museum, gardens, and Glorya Kaufman Community Center. In the garden is a former East German guardhouse that once monitored and controlled access to the Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst (ADN), the state-run, monopoly news agency of the German Democratic Republic. The guardhouse now plays host to installations that explore how a site of control can be reimagined by contemporary artists as a tool for critically examining our contemporary relationship to open communication and state power.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wende Museum at Google Cultural Institute
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