Culver City's own Wende Museum is presenting a reading of poetry created in response to artworks exhibited in the Deconstructing Perestroika exhibition at the Craft and Folk Art Museum at 5814 Wilshire Blvd. The event this Saturday, Febuary 25, from 7 pm to 9 pm is organized by Brendan Constantine, Los Angeles poet and author of Birthday Girl Wit Possum, and will feature poets Ilya Kaminsky, Cecilia Woloch and Arash Saedinia.

In collaboration with the Craft and Folk Art Museum, The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War is currently presenting Deconstructing Perestroika, the first major exhibition in the United States of hand-painted Soviet-era political posters that were inspired by a new government policy of transparency in the former Soviet Union. Organized to mark the 20^th anniversary of the former super power’s demise in December 1991, this exhibition highlights some of the key political and cultural shifts that defined the era and ultimately led to the fall of the superpower, namely Mikhail Gorbachev’s transformative policies of Glasnost and Perestroika in the late-1980s and early-1990s. These posters illustrates the tradition of hand-painted poster design, known in Russian as avtorskii plakat, which is an outgrowth of traditional Soviet agitprop. The exhibition is curated by Ljiljana Grubisic, Director of Collections and Public Programs at The Wende Museum.