The Wende Museum is an art museum, historical archive of the Cold War, and center for creative community engagement in Culver City, California.
Mission
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 wide-ranging experimentation.
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.
The Wende aims to explore and inspire change through
collecting, preserving, and providing open access to artwork, artifacts, archives, films, and personal histories from the sphere touched by socialism during the Cold War era (1945–1991); promoting rigorous scholarship, educating students, and stimulating general interest through lectures, symposia, publications, and providing access to digitized collections; presenting experimental exhibitions and interdisciplinary programming inspired by the collection; facilitating creative collaborations with contemporary artists and designers; partnering with other nonprofit organizations; and providing community services such as wellness programs, opportunities for civic engagement, and family-friendly activities.
Collections
The Wende's collections are a resource for learning about the vanishing cultural, political, and artistic histories of the former East Bloc countries and the Soviet Union, as well as countries with a history of socialism including China, Vietnam, and North Korea. The Wende supports emerging fields of aesthetic and academic study in visual and material culture studies as well as cultural history. The museum promotes a multi-layered exploration and discussion of the Cold War era on a global scale.
The collection focuses on:
materials originating from East Germany, with more than 50% of the collection from the GDR; items used in everyday life and artworks capturing lived experience; materials that document "Wende Moments," or junctures in Cold War history marked by extreme change—beginnings, endings, and transformative events such as the formation of the Warsaw Pact, the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, and the collapse of the Soviet Union; and official and unofficial artwork.
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 collections of Hungarian Cold War era artworks and artifacts, Russian hippie materials from the 1960s and 1970s, Polish solidarity materials, Soviet demilitarization albums, and artifacts from the now-shuttered KGB Espionage Museum.The museum's East German collections are the subject of a major publication, Beyond the Wall: Art and Artifacts from the GDR/ Jenseits der Mauer. Kunst und Alltagsgegenstände aus der DDR (TASCHEN, 2014). In 2019, TASCHEN published a smaller second edition of the book, The East German Handbook, featuring text in both English and German.
The museum's collections have been exhibited in a number of other museums and institutions, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 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), the International Spy Museum (Washington, D.C.), and the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles).