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| Established | 2002 |
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| Location | 10808 Culver Blvd, Culver City, CA 90230 |
| Coordinates | 34°00′42″N118°24′14″W / 34.011647°N 118.403932°W |
| Type | Cultural Museum |
| Director | Justinian Jampol |
| Public transit access | Culver City Bus 3 and Metro Local bus 108 and 358 at Slauson Avenue/Buckingham Parkway |
| Website | www |
The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive in Culver City, California. [1]
Wende (pronounced “venda”) is a German word that translates into English as “transformation.” It commonly refers to the era of uncertainty and possibility leading up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Embracing a spirit of continual transformation as part of its mission, the Wende aspires to reach beyond the conventional walls of a museum, placing equal value on international scholarship, community engagement, digital access, and creative experimentation. [2] [3]
Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds one of the largest collections of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in personal and social change for a better future. [4]
The Wende aims to explore and inspire change through
Initially a collections-focused institution primarily accessed by researchers, the Wende has transformed into a 21st-century cultural organization that brings together art and history in dynamic community programming for all ages. In 2024, the Wende opened the three-story Glorya Kaufman Community Center, where the Wende and partner nonprofits offer cultural and educational programs to the community at no cost to participants. [6] The Glorya Kaufman Community Center was named one of the “8 Best New Architecture Projects in L.A. for 2024.” [7]
Programming [8] highlights at the Wende Museum, the Wende’s Glorya Kaufman Community Center, [9] 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. [11] [12] [13] The Wende also participated in Getty’s PST Art Climate Impact Program. [14]
The Wende's collections are a resource for learning about the vanishing cultural, political, and artistic histories of the former East Bloc countries, the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba. The Wende supports emerging fields of aesthetic and academic study in visual and material culture studies as well as cultural history.
The collection ranges from consumer products (e.g., computers, radios, records, toiletries, foodstuff) to works of modern and contemporary art in all media (e.g., paintings, drawings, sculptures, graphics, photographs), iconic political symbols (e.g., statuary, medals, flags, uniforms, commemorative gifts), and archives—including a substantial gift from East German leader Erich Honecker's estate—and some 3,500 16mm documentary, animation, and educational films as well as home movies from the GDR. The museum contains large collections of furniture, flags and banners, 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, [15] Hungarian Cold War era artworks and artifacts, [16] Russian hippie materials from the 1960s and 1970s, Polish Solidarity materials, Soviet demilitarization albums, and artifacts from the now-shuttered KGB Espionage Museum. [17] 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) [18] and The East German Handbook (TASCHEN, 2019). [19]
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), [20] 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.). [21]
The Wende Museum was founded in 2002 by Justinian Jampol, a native of Los Angeles and scholar of modern European history. [22] [23]
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. [24] [25] 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. [26] [27]
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. [28] [29]
Culver City is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 40,779. It is mostly surrounded by Los Angeles, but also shares a border with the unincorporated area of Ladera Heights to the east. The city was named after its founder, Harry Culver, who first attempted to establish it in 1913.
The culture of Los Angeles is rich with arts and ethnically diverse. The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable art museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Museum on the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking the Pacific, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), and the Hammer Museum. In the 1920s and 1930s Will Durant and Ariel Durant, Arnold Schoenberg and other intellectuals were the representatives of culture, in addition to the movie writers and directors. As the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world. Los Angeles is strongly influenced by Mexican American culture due to California formerly being part of Mexico and, previously, the Spanish Empire.
Eli Broad was an American businessman and philanthropist. In June 2019, Forbes ranked him as the 233rd-wealthiest person in the world and the 78th-wealthiest in the United States, with an estimated net worth of $6.7 billion. He was known for his philanthropic commitment to transforming public K–12 education to a charter school model, scientific and medical research, and the visual and performing arts.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, commonly referred to as the Getty, is an art museum in Los Angeles, California housed on two campuses: the Getty Center and Getty Villa. It is operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust, the world's wealthiest art institution.
The J. Paul Getty Trust is the world's wealthiest art institution, with an estimated endowment of US$7.7 billion in 2020. Based in Los Angeles, California, it operates the J. Paul Getty Museum, which has two locations—the Getty Center in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles and the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Its other programs are the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute.
The California African American Museum (CAAM) is a museum located in Exposition Park, Los Angeles, next to the California Science Center. The museum focuses on enrichment and education on the cultural heritage and history of African Americans with a focus on California and western United States.
The Getty Villa is an educational center and an art museum located at the easterly end of the Malibu coast in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, United States. One of two campuses of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Villa is dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome, and Etruria. The collection has 44,000 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities dating from 6,500 BC to 400 AD, including the Lansdowne Heracles and the Victorious Youth. The UCLA/Getty Master's Program in Archaeological and Ethnographic Conservation is housed on this campus.
The Fowler Museum at UCLA is a museum on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) which explores art and material culture primarily from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, past and present.
Clement Hanami is a Japanese-American artist. He grew up in the predominantly Latino California suburb of East Los Angeles, just outside of downtown. His mother was a hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivor. His father was a World War II incarceree.
The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".
The Getty Foundation, based in Los Angeles, California at the Getty Center, awards grants for "the understanding and preservation of the visual arts". In the past, it funded the Getty Leadership Institute for "current and future museum leaders", which is now at Claremont Graduate University. Its budget for 2006–07 was $27.8 million. It is part of the J. Paul Getty Trust.
Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist.
The Getty Conservation Institute (GCI), located in Los Angeles, California, is a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust. It is headquartered at the Getty Center but also has facilities at the Getty Villa, and commenced operation in 1985. The GCI is a private international research institution dedicated to advancing conservation practice through the creation and delivery of knowledge. It "serves the conservation community through scientific research, education and training, model field projects, and the dissemination of the results of both its own work and the work of others in the field" and "adheres to the principles that guide the work of the Getty Trust: service, philanthropy, teaching, and access." GCI has activities in both art conservation and architectural conservation.
Benedikt Taschen is a German publisher and contemporary art collector. He is the founder and managing director of the publishing house Taschen, one of the most successful international publishers, with illustrated publications on a range of themes including art, architecture, design, film, photography, pop culture, and lifestyle.
Jennifer Vanderpool is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles. In her work "there is a chipper cynicism to the retro character of the figures, buildings, fashions, and patterns, so that there is certainly a sense of tradition, yet there is also a sense of transference and surrealism."
Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980 was a scholarly initiative funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust to historicize the contributions to contemporary art history of artists, curators, critics, and others based in Los Angeles. Planned for nearly a decade, PST, as it was called, granted nearly 60 organizations throughout Southern California a total of $10 million to produce exhibitions that explored the years between 1945 and 1980. Underscoring the significance of this project, art critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times:
Before [PST], we knew a lot [about the history of contemporary art], and that lot tended to greatly favor New York. A few Los Angeles artists were highly visible and unanimously revered, namely Ed Ruscha and other denizens of the Ferus Gallery, that supercool locus of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s, plus Bruce Nauman and Chris Burden, but that was about it. After, we know a whole lot more, and the balance is much more even. One of the many messages delivered by this profusion of what will eventually be nearly 70 museum exhibitions is that New York did not act alone in the postwar era. And neither did those fabulous Ferus boys.
Nancy Buchanan is an American visual artist, known for her work in installation, performance, and video art. She played a central role in the feminist art movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Her work has been exhibited widely and is collected by major museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou. She is Los Angeles-based.
Justinian (Justin) Jampol is the founder and current executive director of The Wende Museum of the Cold War, an art museum, historical archive, and educational institution in Culver City, California. His work focuses on visual cultural studies and the connection between contemporary art and Cold War iconography. He is also the host and consulting producer of the Travel Channel series Lost Secrets.
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The USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance is a private dance school at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California. The school offers a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and minors in dance.
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