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Wende Museum workshops turn Cold War dissent into art
The Culver City museum’s twice-monthly Samizdat Sundays use collage, textiles and archival objects to explore censorship, surveillance and private expression.
The Wende Museum in Culver City is using hands-on art workshops to connect Cold War-era underground publishing with modern questions about speech and surveillance, the Los Angeles Times reported September 28. Los Angeles artist and poet Kate Ingold leads the Samizdat Sundays program, which moves to two sessions per month in October.
What it means locally
Samizdat was the practice of privately producing and circulating writing that state censors had suppressed in the Soviet Union. At the Wende workshops, participants respond to prompts with collage, discarded textiles and material from the museum’s Soviet Hippie collection, an archive documenting a subculture that emerged during the 1960s. The sessions are designed to help participants examine the boundary between public and private expression and consider how people have created art under political pressure. The accompanying photograph shows the Wende Museum in June 2026 and is not an image of a Samizdat Sundays workshop.
Full report and further details: Read original report →