CULVER CITY, CA.- The Wende Museum presents Crumbling Empire and Upside-Down Propaganda, two new exhibitions featuring subversive art by Soviet painters, Shepard Fairey, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and North Korean defector Sun Mu on view February 10 to June 2, 2019.

Even the most restrictive authoritarian regimes are unable to completely silence voices of dissent. Two new exhibitions at the Wende Museum explore the role of art in grassroots and subversive expression, from the Soviet Union to North Korea to the United States. Across borders and generations, American street artist Shepard Fairey, Soviet artists of the glasnost and perestroika era, and North Korean propaganda-poster artist turned dissident painter Sun Mu appropriate and reinterpret the aesthetics and symbols of authority to create messages of liberation. This will be the first exhibition of Sun Mu’s work in a U.S. museum.

Crumbling Empire: The Power of Dissident Voices
Crumbling Empire will present Russian poster designs of the 1980s and early ’90s alongside contemporary American street art by Shepard Fairey in a salon-style display that highlights connections as much as differences in dissident art of the East and the West, the past and the present.

During the late 1980s, the period of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform), thirty-eight Moscow-based artists, trained in poster design, harnessed a newly freed-up countercultural energy to produce a unique series of paintings with a highly critical and at times ironic take on Soviet socialism. Beverly Hills High School teacher Tom Ferris and his wife, Jeri, got to know these artists and collected their works during their regular travels to the Soviet Union. The Wende Museum acquired 234 of these paintings from the Ferrises, and will present a selection of the Tom and Jeri Ferris Russian Collection in the exhibition Crumbling Empire, along with glasnost and perestroika-era posters from the collection of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, San Diego.

In the center of the galleries, viewers will encounter a complementary display of works by iconic American street artist Shepard Fairey. Creator of designs including the Barack Obama “HOPE” poster and “Obey Giant,” Fairey is a legendary figure whose work questions societal pressures and norms loudly and visibly in public space.

Also included is the central panel from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s monumental Unity (1993). This large-scale representation of an angel by the founders of Sots Art (the Soviet counterpart to Pop Art) was created for the lobby of the US Bank tower in downtown Los Angeles (the City of Angels)—an ironic gesture placing a symbol of heavenly love at the center of a thoroughly capitalist institution.

The pairing of Shepard Fairey’s posters with works by important artists from the Soviet Bloc asks viewers to seek aesthetic and political parallels, continuities, and differences in subversive expressions across national and historical contexts.

Upside-Down Propaganda: The Art of North Korean Defector Sun Mu
The Wende presents the first U.S. museum exhibition of the North Korean dissident artist Sun Mu.

Sun Mu – a pseudonym, meaning “no borders” – fled his country (the last remaining Stalinist state on earth) 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.

Sun Mu’s first exhibition in Seoul was met with confused responses, as some viewers felt they were being confronted with North Korean state propaganda, and the authorities were called. In 2014, a planned exhibition of Sun Mu’s works in Beijing was canceled at the last minute, following North Korean protests.

Wende Museum Board members Blaine Vess (who serves on the board of Liberty in North Korea) and Fiona Chalom combined efforts to retrieve Sun Mu's paintings from China and bring them to Southern California, where the Wende will present the first U.S. museum exhibition of the dissident artist's work.