Past
Polish-American director and writer Hanna Sawka, Belarusian-American scholar, writer, and art critic Sasha Razor, and Ukrainian-American artist Molly Surazhsky will speak about the remarkable role of flags and banners in the contemporary art world of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.
Due to illness on the part of one of the musicians, this event has been cancelled.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky was a visionary Russian composer who spent his adult life in Paris, having graduated from law school the day before the Russian Revolution in 1917. The year before, he had a vision: “I saw the great light in full day,” and hence dedicated his life to “awakening in every man the slumbering forces of cosmic consciousness” with his music. Grammy-nominated pianists Vicki Ray & Aron Kallay team up with Steven Vanhauwaert, Sarah Gibson, and conductor Donald Crockett to perform the powerful piano quartets Cosmos op.28, Étude sur le carré magique sonore op.40, and selections from the duos 24 Préludes, concluding with the towering 25-minute masterwork Thus Spake Zarathustra op.17. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime performance.
Join us at the Wende on Sunday, May 29 for our creative Family Day activity, Identity Flags. Inspired by the artists' conceptual explorations and reinterpretations of flags and banners in the exhibition The Medium is the Message: Flags and Banners, participants will craft their own personal flag that reflects their individual identity and values.
Samuel Clowes Huneke, Assistant Professor of Modern German History at George Mason University, will speak about his new book States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany.
Inna Faliks, a renowned pianist and the head of UCLA's Piano department, presents a musical program that explores Mikhail Bulgakov's iconic Soviet novel of art, irony, love, religion, and Faustian legend, The Master and Margarita. Faliks will perform the world premiere of two compositions that celebrate the novel and have been composed especially for this evening: Maya Miro Johnson's Manuscripts Don't Burn, for speaking pianist and Margarita suite for piano by Veronika Krausas.
Join us for a conversation between Joanna Stingray, singer, music producer, and writer, and Alexander Kan, London-based music critic, journalist, writer, broadcaster, and one of the leading experts in Soviet jazz and rock music. The conversation will be moderated by Olya Sova, Los Angeles and London-based curator and founder of The New Social arts organization.
A collaboration between Jacaranda Music, Culver City Forward, and Culver City Unified School District, and the Wende Museum, this special fundraiser concert will include performances of classical Ukrainian, Russian and Polish music, as well as a reading of selected works by Ukrainian poets and a Ukrainian visual arts slideshow. The concert is free of charge, a minimum donation of $20 or $50 per family is recommended for humanitarian support in Ukraine.
Join us at the Wende on Sunday, April 24 for our latest Family Day activity, Identity Flags. Inspired by the artists' conceptual explorations and reinterpretations of flags and banners in the exhibition The Medium is the Message: Flags and Banners, participants will craft their own personal flag that reflects their individual identity and values.
Please join us to celebrate the opening of our three new exhibitions and installations The Medium is the Message, Martin Roemers: Relics of the Cold War, and Light-Guard-House: Installation by Farrah Karapetian, with refreshments, programs, and guided tours!
Since 1998, Roemers has conducted "photographic archeological research" on the physical remains of the Cold War. Visually, he seeks out stillness in the remains of military infrastructure that is slowly and steadily being overtaken by nature. Traveling through former "enemy territory," Roemers explores these deserted military installations through his medium-format camera, finding rusting tanks and destroyed monuments. Descending into underground bunkers, he captures a still present sense of paranoia and hyper-alertness. On both sides of the Iron Curtain he finds enormous amounts of nuclear shelters, air force bases, shooting ranges, rocket launch pads, border fences, and radar stations, all built with a shared sense of fear.
Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Sichong Xie’s guardhouse installation, Memory Structure, Scaffold Series, features objects and arrangements emblematic of memory and temporality: bamboo scaffolding, embroidery on industrial mesh, and a set of laser-engraved drawings that will fade from continual exposure to light, through which the artist reimagines architectural drawings created by her grandfather in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
What is history? What are historical facts? How do we experience our own past and the history of the world? In times of culture wars about monuments and history education, this exhibition asks questions about the character of historical knowledge and the stories we tell about the past. Facts do matter, while the ways we interpret them are often subjective and open to debate or the cause of social discord.
Museums are educational institutions that have pertinent stories to share, yet most visitors are not aware of the complex discussions behind an exhibition concept, or even a single object label. Questionable History focuses on illuminating these often invisible question marks.
Russia has had a long, tumultuous history with its Jewish citizens. Short periods of prosperity and acceptance were alternated with centuries of persecution and exclusion. During the Cold War, Soviet Jews experienced discrimination and often were disciplined when they applied for emigration to Israel, Europe, or the United States. Applications came at a great cost, resulting in the loss of employment, educational opportunities, and isolation from family and friends. The Soviet Jewish experience is at the core of the work in this exhibition by Bill Aron and Yevgeniy Fiks.
This month’s activity continues our deep dive into the Soviet Jewry movement and the practices of the Soviet underground press (samizdat). Using an authentic 1970s Cyrillic script typewriter, participants will type out translated activist slogans from the Soviet Jewry movement and design a micro-publication to contain them in the style of Soviet samizdat.
Join us for the second of two partner programs presented in conjunction with Holocaust Museum LA’s Ruth Gruber: Photojournalist and the Wende Museum’s Soviet Jewish Life exhibitions. This panel discussion will focus on the lives of Refuseniks and other Soviet Jews during the Cold War period. Speakers are Bill Aron, whose photographs are on view in our current exhibition, and Professor Michael Berenbaum, rabbi, writer, filmmaker, former Project Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and former Director of the museum’s Holocaust Research Institute.