Wende Museum curator Joes Segal has assembled four important poster collections under the exhibition titled Crumbling Empire. The Tom and Jeri Ferris Russian Collection feature works by important artists from the Soviet Bloc asking viewers to seek aesthetic and political parallels, continuities, and differences in subversive expressions across national and historical contexts. Poster work by artist Shepard Fairey brings a present-day interpretation of protest poster art. The Ron Miriello Soviet Poster Show collection provides an historical context from the Soviet Glasnost and Peristroika period. The Wende also presents the first U.S. museum exhibition of the North Korean dissident artist Sun Mu who fled his country in 1998. Trained as a propaganda-poster artist, he continues to work in the style in which he once glorified the North Korean army and state leaders, ironically turning propagandistic messages on their heads.
View the Sun Mu exhibition catalog
The Wende Museum The Armory, Culver City, California
Sunday, February 10, 2019 - Sunday, June 2, 2019