The Wende Museum, which has an enormous collection of Cold War art and artifacts, will finally get a permanent, consolidated home next summer when it opens in Culver City's old National Guard Armory building on Culver Boulevard (they're the guys, incidentally, who helped bring pieces of the Berlin Wall to Wilshire Boulevard). The museum's collection is mindblowing enough--100,000 pieces currently stored in three warehouses across the region--that Taschen is also publishing a book on it this year. According to a press release, the museum has signed a 75-year lease and will renovate the 1950 Armory in three phases; eventually they'll add "20,000 square feet of storage and exhibition space" on the one-acre site. The Wende was founded in 2002 and right now only about one percent of its collection is open to the public, at its space on Buckingham Parkway in Culver. Highlights include: "a ten-foot bronze sculpture of Lenin by the preeminent Russian artist Pavel Bondarenko, a complete set of the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland, and the personal papers, notes, and the Moabit prison manuscript of Erich Honecker, the notorious leader of East Germany."
· Wende Museum To Open The World's Largest Cold War Visual Archive In Historic Armory Building In Culver City, California [MarketWatch]
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