Author: The Argonaut

The Wende Museum revisits the Eastern Bloc feminist art underground By Christina Campodonico East Germany is long dead, but women who created subversive art under the suppression of Stasi espionage are still making universal statements about feminism and patriarchy through artwork that survives at the Wende Museum in Culver City. “The Medea Insurrection: Radical Women Artists Behind the Iron Curtain” gives a long overdue spotlight to artists whose work has been overshadowed by male counterparts or interpreted only through the Cold War’s geopolitical context, asserts exhibit curator Susanne Altmann. “I think we often make the mistake that we put...

30 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, political historians fear intangible barriers are moving the world back in time By Joe Piasecki and Christina Campodonico Nov. 9, 1989, was a big day in the history of freedom. The peaceful dismantling of the Berlin Wall, which for 28 years had sealed off West Berlin from Soviet satellite East Germany, signaled an end to the Cold War and — at least in the United States — optimism about the triumph of Western democratic values. Thirty years later, Americans do not live in such optimistic times. “Surveillance is in the...

An exhibit about walls, both literal and figurative, investigates what people project onto them By Bliss Bowen “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…” — Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” The entire text of Frost’s classic poem greets visitors to the Annenberg Space for Photography’s new exhibit “W|ALLS: Defend, Divide, and the Divine,” on display through Dec. 29. Accompanied by a photo of a wall on Frost’s New England property, the poem emblemizes the increasing prevalence of visual language and asks: Why do we need these structures dividing us? “So often that poem is quoted just as the final line, ‘good...