Past
To shed light on the ways Cold War history impacted human lives, the Fiona Chalom and Joel Aronowitz Historical Witness Project gathers oral histories from people who lived in the Eastern Bloc during the period from 1945 to 1991. This event will be a live interview conducted at the Wende Museum with Tomas Osinski, a Polish artist, architect, and former dissident.
The Wende recently acquired Osinski's significant personal collection of materials from the Polish opposition during the Soviet era. Moreover, Osinski organized and facilitated a large donation of documents, pamphlets, and photographs from other Polish collections. This live interview by actor and podcast host Mark Valley (Boston Legal, The Live Drop) will revisit Osinski's memories of the Polish underground.
Join us for special all-ages activities all day on Sunday, January 26, in conjunction with our Historical Witness Project Live Interview event. Participants will be invited to create artworks and zines in the spirit of Samizdat, the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. Free and all materials will be provided.
We can only learn from history if we remember it. But how do we decide what to remember? What materials are ignored by museums, archives, and libraries, and get lost forever? When does memory become an unbearable burden, weighing us down instead of enriching our perspective? Featuring Ellen DuBois, Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at UCLA; Choi Chatterjee, Professor of History at CSULA; Steven Fisher, Executive Director of the Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum; and Ken Gonzales-Day, visual artist and Professor of Photography and Head of the Art Department at Scripps College. Moderated by Joes Segal, Chief Curator and Director of Programming at the Wende Museum.
Don’t Cry, Pretty Girls! (1970) captures the youth culture of 1960s Hungary, and follows a group of music fans from their daily life in a steel factory to nights out, going from concert to concert. Juli (Jarka Schallerová) has left her home in the countryside and is living in a workers’ hostel; she falls for a musician (Lajos Balázsovits), and soon must face a choice between him and her fiancé (Márk Zala). The film features performances by top rock bands of the 1960s and early 70s such as Kex, Metro, and Illés (the Hungarian counterpart to the Beatles), who were later banned due to political pressure. By using lyrics with hidden political meaning, Mészáros was able to escape censorship.
Join authors Howard and Elaine Behnken for a reading of their holiday book Bruce Bruce the Hanukkah Moose in the Wende Museum garden. This family-friendly event is free and open to all.
Please join us on Friday, December 20 for refreshments in the garden and exhibition viewing of The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain. There will be an exhibition tour at 6:30 p.m. led by Chief Curator Joes Segal and members of the Wende Museum Teen Council.
What Remains is a new work created for the Wende Museum garden that focuses on the dual stories of Orpheus and Eurydice as imagined by the poet Ranier Maria Rilke, and with reference to Stasi surveillance as depicted in the short story "What Remains" published in German in 1990 by Christa Wolf. Both movement and opera emanate from the female perspective and examine the notion of memory, the idea of forgetting and the struggle for individuality. This experimental work has been created by three composers including an opera for seven voices by Leaha Maria Villarreal, prepared trumpet by Sarah Belle Reid, and flute and electronics by Justin Scheid. Choreography and Direction by Heidi Duckler.
Classical Undergrounds presents a performance of Soviet-period instrumental and vocal music, including works by Dmitri Shostakovich, Matvey Blanter, Vadim Kozin, Alexander Vertinsky, Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Rodion Shchedrin.
Join us for Family Day and celebrate the opening of Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain. This Family Day will focus on everyday fabrics like cotton and polyester, materials that clothe us and protect us, but very often we don’t give a second thought. Kids will be tasked with creating clothes for a series of unusual and unexpected purposes, as we explore the important physical and emotional role textiles play in our lives.
Students between the ages of 13 and 18, join us for the Wende Museum’s first-ever Teen Night, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The evening's activities include music by The Campbells and Cohort, a hands-on street-art project with the artist Muck Rock (bring clothes you don’t mind getting messy!), and food and drinks provided by Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and Loqui. Guests will also have a chance to explore our newest exhibition, The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain.
The Polyphony Quartet is composed of Arab and Jewish musicians from Israel whose work aims to promote cultural exchange and understanding through music. They will perform pieces representing Israel’s diverse communities as well as a composition by Dmitri Shostakovich, whose works transcended the political division of the Cold War.
Join us in celebrating the opening of The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain and to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The opening will include a guided tour, reception, and a panel discussion on The Medea Insurrection. Panelists include artists Chelle Barbour, Orshi Drozdik, Christa Jeitner, Gabriele Stötzer, and Sichong Xie. The panel will be moderated by guest curator Susanne Altmann.
What was on TV in the Soviet Bloc? If “propaganda” is your immediate response, Watching Socialism will complicate the picture with excerpts from news programs, sitcoms, cartoons, subversive interventions, and other televised content alongside TV-related magazines, artifacts, toys, and television sets from the Eastern Bloc, showing what it was really like to watch TV on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
Look beyond the binary framework of the U.S./Soviet Cold War at the Nonaligned Movement (NAM), which pushed for peaceful coexistence and justice for all the world’s peoples. Nonalignment and Tito in Africa presents photographs from the 1950s through 1970s of state visits to various African nations by Josip Broz Tito, the Yugoslav leader who was a founding member of NAM and cultivated a reputation for transnational solidarity and hopes for a “third way” beyond U.S.-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism. Yet these carefully staged photographs of meetings of heads of state reveal the still-relevant challenges of both framing and enacting solidarity amid uneven power relations.