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Angela Thompson is a former board member of the Wende Museum.
consultant
Angela Thompson is a former board member of the Wende Museum.
A turning point for Wende Museum of the Cold War Fifteen years ago Justinian Jampol began collecting the art, artifacts and detritus of the daily lives of people from the former Eastern Block. This was the foundation for the Wende Museum of the Cold War , which now has a collection of 100,000 objects ranging from statues of political leaders and state-sanctioned art to tea towels, restaurant menus, military uniforms and toys like the Pittiplatsch hand puppets beloved by children in former East Germany. It is the largest collection of Soviet-era art and artifacts outside of Europe. Now Wende -- German for "turning point" or "change" -- has gone through a big change of its own. It has moved from its longtime cramped space in a nondescript office park in Culver City to a permanent home in a space that comes with a nice historic twist: a National Guard Armory built by the US Army in 1949 with, says Jampol, "the explicit purpose of surviving a first strike of Soviet bombs." With a big assist from many supporters, including art and design book publisher Benedikt Taschen and designer and preservationist Michael Boyd, the concrete bunker-like building has become an open, light-filled, unadorned space with galleries formed by movable partitions. "Cold War Spaces" at the Wende Museum Photo by Michael Underwood The museum's inaugural exhibitions include Cold War Spaces, devoted to "public space, private space, Utopian space, secret space, outer space, etcetera. The show, says chief curator Joes Segal, is intended "to highlight different aspects of socialist life" from politicized public space to bunkers in the East Berlin Metro. It includes black and white photos of some choice Soviet-style brutalist architecture. So what do former residents of the Soviet Union think about this museum? DnA talks to women who grew up in East Germany, and finds the objects trigger nostalgia for the happy aspects of childhood in an oppressive society that they remember nonetheless as secure and safe. The Wende Museum's relaunch feels strangely timely, now the US is back in the shadow of the Cold War as a special prosecutor investigates whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. Justin Jampol promises lectures, programs and workshops that will engage the public in dialogue about past and present. He told DnA, "the museum has a responsibility and a chance to really be a forum for civic engagement around so many of these themes that directly relate to the Cold War era... Open up a newspaper or look online and it's stories of Russia, North Korea and walls and surveillance and spying. And so these are very Cold War themes but they're contemporary as well."
Securing Public Spaces, Super Wealthy Asians Vehicles are increasingly being used as weapons, as seen in the London Bridge attack over the weekend and in New York’s Times Square last month. The Compton-based company Calpipe is designing security bollards to help make public spaces safer. And novelist Kevin Kwan satirizes the “crazy rich” Asian jet set and their luxurious tastes in his latest book, “Rich People Problems.”
Accusations of lying fly between James Comey and White House During his testimony Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey accused President Trump and other White House officials of lying when they said the FBI was in disarray and its staff had lost confidence in him. President Trump’s lawyer said Comey was wrong -- that the president never asked for his loyalty, and never asked him to back off the investigation into former NSA director Michael Flynn.
In 'Speechless,' Scott Silveri combines comedy, family & disability Scott Silveri has written and produced sitcoms for more than 20 years. In all that time, he never encountered a TV family that looked anything like the one he grew up in -- with a mom, a dad...and a brother with cerebral palsy. He changed that with his show Speechless on ABC. Silveri tells us about looking to his own past for stories, and why he was determined to make a family comedy and not just a "disability show."
George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo (Part I) Lincoln in the Bardo dramatizes a grieving President Lincoln as he visits the grave of his beloved son Willie, who died at age eleven. In the novel, the buried dead believe they're not dead -- "they're sick and refer to their coffins as "sick boxes."