Memories of Modern Utopias
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| Installation view, "Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant" |
The Wende Museum's two new shows center on architecture—plus socialism, the Third World, the Cold War, and memory.
"Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant" is the Wende's first large-scale art installation. From 1957 to 1963 the artist's father built a modern home in Cuba. Talk about remodel hell—the construction spanned the Cuban revolution, the Cuba missile crisis, and the family's long wait for an exile in Spain. The artist reimagines the home, in smaller scale, in sugar. (His father worked in a sugar refinery.) The installation contains several paintings inside and outside the house.
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| Enrique Martínez Celaya, detail of "The Sextant" |
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| Installation view, "Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana" |
"Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana" considers two Modernist architects—one from Cold War Hungary, the other a Howard University-trained Ghanaian—whose paths crossed in postcolonial Ghana. They helped Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, realize a vision of Accra as a capital of Modernism.
Polónyi was part of a move to extend the Eastern Bloc's influence to socialist nations of the Third World. Polónyi however was effectively an exiled dissident. He refused to join Hungary's Communist party and was told that it would be impossible to build a career in his homeland.
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| Victor Adegbite |
In Ghana Polónyi worked on housing for the Ghana National Construction Corporation, where Adegbite was chief architect. Though grounded in archives preserved by the two architects' families, the exhibition is also an exercise in imagination. The extent of Adegbite and Polónyi's collaboration remains unclear. Each man wrote an architectural memoir that never mentions the other.
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| Model and gallery text for Adegbite and Polónyi's GNCC 100, a house with three bedrooms commissioned by the Ghana National Construction Corporation in 1964 |
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| Eric Don-Arthur photos of Flagstaff Barracks, Accra, 2025 |
President Nkrumah turned dictator and was overthrown in 1966. This scattered the architects: Polónyi worked on projects in Nigeria and Ethiopia, while Adegbite settled in the U.S.
In outline the story of Accra Modernism is a familiar one. It began with the utopian vision of bringing affordable Modern homes to the masses. In practice Adegbite and Polónyi's housing projects were available mainly to high-ranking government workers. They retained an air of exclusivity even as they degenerated into ruins. Contemporary Ghanaian architect Eric Don-Arthur took unsparing photos of the buildings as they exist after decades of deferred maintenance. The vibe is a mix of William Eggleston, Grey Gardens, and A Clockwork Orange. "How should we build?" remains an unanswered question, in Los Angeles as in Accra.
"Intersections" runs through Apr. 12, 2026, and "Enrique Martínez Celaya" continues through October 11, 2026.
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| Eric Don-Arthur photo of Flagstaff Barracks, 2025 |
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