Kaufman

We whine and purr and howl, a collective release.

About 20 of us are huddled in a patch of shade, beneath a cluster of palm trees, in a sleepy Culver City garden. Paired up, we face our partners, cup our hands behind our ears and let out loud, primal noises. And we laugh.

We’re participating in a “tuning exercise” led by the performing arts group Cantilever Collective. It’s part of a movement workshop meant to facilitate connection between individuals and help regulate our central nervous systems so as to release stress and promote a sense of overall well-being.

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Where are we, exactly? At one of Los Angeles’ newest and most robust wellness hubs — held, perhaps counterintuitively, inside the Wende Museum of the Cold War. The Culver City museum, which opened its doors in 2017, debuted its Glorya Kaufman Community Center last weekend, a 7,500-square-foot space for cultural programming and wellness activities. The three-story, modernist concrete building, which sits across the sculpture garden from the museum’s exhibition hall, was made possible with funding from the late philanthropist Glorya Kaufman, who passed away in August. Her foundation provided the lead gift toward the $17-million new building and committed $6 million toward programming.

The new community center includes a 150-seat theater inside a refurbished, century-old A-frame structure, an old MGM prop house. It will host all the expected cultural programming such as screenings, live talks and dance performances, among other events. But it will also offer yoga classes, guided meditations, sound baths, dance and movement classe, and healing writing workshops for L.A. wildfire victims, as well as herb and incense-making workshops and matcha tea-making classes.

Most notably? All of these wellness activities are free to the public. The center will also offer about 100 hours of free therapy a year, with licensed psychologists, as well as life-coaching sessions.

The modernist concrete building evokes Cold War–era architecture.

The Wende is quickly becoming “the living room of Culver City,” as visitor Lisette Palley, 74, describes it. She attends meditations at the community center, which soft-launched in January, weekly. “This place, it has an ease about it, an openness, a generosity that you don’t find everywhere you go,” Palley says.

Increasingly, museums and art galleries have been adding wellness activities to event calendars. The Hammer Museum has long held weekly mindfulness meditations on its campus, the Huntington regularly holds forest bathing and tai chi workshops and the J. Paul Getty Museum’s education department offers a “Wellness Day for Educators” at the Getty Center that includes yoga, a sound bath and guided mindfulness — to name a few. But typically, such wellness events are the programming exception at museums, and often they’re in conversation with an exhibition on view. The Glorya Kaufman Community Center at the Wende will host wellness activities nearly every day of the week, with “Wellness Wednesdays” being especially robust.

“There’s an affordability crisis in this country right now, and the things we’re providing are human rights,” says Wende founder and executive director Justin Jampol. “This museum — art — has always been sustenance for your soul. Now it’s sustenance for your mind and body. We realize we can’t inspire people if they’re hungry or sick. We have to tend to the whole person.”

Earlier in the day, about 50 visitors enjoyed a mindfulness meditation in the A-frame theater led by Christiane Wolf, a former physician turned meditation teacher. Wolfe encouraged the crowd to “just be … lean on the strength of community.”

Light bites are served in the courtyard. Soon, the center will debut its new Konsum Cafe.

Afterward, guests mingled in the courtyard over borscht and Russian tea made from fermented fireweed, honey and pine bud, among other offerings. A soon-to-debut Konsum Cafe will serve freshly baked bread from Clark Street, specialty coffees and teas, and a rotating menu of homemade soups from regions around the world that relate to its exhibition programming (first up: borscht, Hungarian goulash and Vietnamese pho). All of the food and drink in the cafe will also be free.

“We’re hardwired to come together as communities, and if we’re sharing food, it’s very regulating for our nervous systems,” Wolf says. “It creates a sense of safety.”

Early on, there were some concerns that people would balk at a Cold War history museum entering the wellness space. But Jampol says it actually makes sense paired with the collection.

“This place, it’s become this subversive museum,” he says. “First, because of the collections — they’re so much about dissonant movements and revolutions — and because it documents and celebrates the human spirit. Even in the face of totalitarian authority and oppression and restrictions, the human spirit has a way of fighting back; the human spirit always finds a way.”

Considering the federal government’s slashing of funding for the arts and public health programs in U.S., the community center is even more relevant now, Jampol says.

A portrait of the late Glorya Kaufman by artist Boris Vansier hangs inside the center.

“The things that get cut first are the things people need most: self-care, eating right, having opportunities for art and culture, going to the theater — those are stress relievers,” he says. “So the idea is to try and address that here in our own small way.”

Kaufman, who died at 95, was a transformative dance world philanthropist in L.A. She established the USC Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, as well as the Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center. At the Wende, she did more than just fund the new center — it was her idea in the first place. She regularly attended music programs and dance events at the Wende, starting not long after its opening. Back then, museum staffers would move chairs and art around to make space for public events. One day in 2019, Kaufman told Jampol, “This is ridiculous. You can’t have heads poking around a statue; this is super weird,” he recalls. They began hatching plans to create a new space for events.

Kaufman and Jampol felt the COVID pandemic only heightened the need for health and wellness programming. The new building broke ground in 2022, designed by AUX Architecture (which designed the Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center at Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services). Other lead donors include the Ahmanson Foundation, the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the Rose Hills Foundation. Culver City donated the plot of land. Wellness activities debuted in the nearby sculpture garden even as construction was underway.

Visitors weren’t deterred by the construction cacophony. Event attendance has more than doubled since last year, Jampol says: about 15,000 program attendees in 2024 compared with about 32,000 so far in 2025.

The theater, with its restored slow-growth Douglas fir, is the crown jewel of the new building. It has a retractable seating system so it can morph into a space with room for a dance floor or sound baths. Practitioners can select the type of event they’ll be leading on a digital keypad and the room will automatically reconfigure itself. Hit “screening” and the lights dim in the audience and a screen drops down, for example. Select “dance hall” and disco lights swirl around the room.

A concrete fountain in the sculpture garden.

On a recent Wellness Wednesday, free snacks included borscht and bread.

Guests mingle in the Wende’s sculpture garden, a space for community connection.

The Wende’s wellness vision also includes a 4,000-square-foot Zen-inspired mediation garden, created by designer Michael Boyd, a scholar of postwar gardens and Midcentury Modern architecture. It features a decomposed granite ground surface studded with river stones and succulents, and is filled with the sounds of crickets and a rushing stream, digitally piped in. The museum is also turning about 200 feet of a median strip along Culver Boulevard into an “herb and incense garden” that will serve the cafe and upcoming incense-making workshops.

Much of the programming will be internally curated and the museum will pay its practitioners (those events will still be free to the public). Other programming will be “community curated.” Meaning, the Wende will make its center available, for free, to any wellness practitioner in L.A. who wants to hold an event there. The only caveat? Their event must be free to the public.

Kaufman may not be able to attend any of these events, but her presence is deeply felt. A portrait of the late philanthropist, by Russian-born, Swiss artist Boris Vansier, hangs by the entrance to the theater.

Participants enjoy a movement workshop with Cantilever Collective at the new Glorya Kaufman Community Center.

Surveying the new building, as Wellness Wednesday attendees stream in and out of it, Jampol appears certain of the museum’s mission and role in the city.

“It’s about these moments of joy and happiness and togetherness amidst awfulness,” he says. “Having these kinds of oases in our lives is so important. There’s a certain tranquility in being in beautiful spaces and being present and being in community with one another. In a way, that is the ultimate purpose of museums.”

Glorya Kaufman, the philanthropist who transformed dance in Los Angeles through the establishment of an eponymous dance school at USC as well as a prominent dance series at the Music Center, among many other initiatives, has died. She was 95.

Kaufman’s death was confirmed by a representative for the Music Center, which was the recipient in 2009 of a $20 million gift from Kaufman that established Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center. The money, which represented the largest donation in L.A.’s dance history, went toward the ongoing staging of appearances by some of the world’s most well-known dancers, troupes and companies, including the Joffrey Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, the Royal Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and Ballet Hispánico.

“Her gift to the Music Center has made it possible for us to bring the joy and beauty of dance into the hearts, minds and souls of countless Angelenos and visitors from around the world,” Music Center President and Chief Executive Rachel Moore said in a statement. “As a result of Glorya’s significant visionary leadership and generosity, Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center today stands as a vital part of Los Angeles’ cultural fabric.”

Kaufman also donated an undisclosed sum to create and endow the USC Kaufman School of Dance, and to build its home, the Glorya Kaufman International Dance Center. When it launched in 2012, the program was the first new school to be established at the university in 40 years. It opened in 2015 with 33 students and has nurtured the talents of dancers who went on to work with internationally recognized companies and artists including Alonzo King LINES Ballet, Staatsballett Berlin and Ballet Jazz Montreal.

In a tribute published by USC staff on the university’s website, USC Interim President Beong-Soo Kim said, “Glorya’s love for dance was contagious, and she spread that love by creating opportunities for people everywhere to experience the transformative impact and joy of the arts.”

“We have so much [dance] talent here in L.A.,” Kaufman told The Times in 2012 when the gift to USC was first announced, “and there’s no place for them to go. We want to get the best students, the best teachers, and the kids, when they graduate, will be able to make a living right away.”

Later that year, The Times described Kaufman’s importance to the dance world:

“The new biggest name in dance is Glorya Kaufman, who shook up the arts world last month when she gave the University of Southern California a gift that despite its undisclosed amount, has been called one of the largest donations in dance history.”

USC was not the first L.A.-area institution of higher learning to benefit from Kaufman’s largess. In 1999 she gave $18 million to fund the restoration of the UCLA Women’s Gym — now called Glorya Kaufman Hall. The Times wrote that her donation was, “the largest individual gift the university has received outside of the health sciences area, and the largest arts donation ever in the University of California system.”

Kaufman also gave money to schools in New York City, including four lifetime endowments for undergraduates at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. A 2,300-square-foot dance studio at the Juilliard School, which she funded, is also named after her.

Although dance was her primary focus, Kaufman’s influence was felt across L.A.’s cultural landscape. She was a founding member of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and also gave to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition, she was a founding trustee of the Geffen Playhouse and donated money to build an outdoor reception area at the theater.

Kaufman believed that dance should be experienced by as many people as possible and was committed to helping less advantaged students gain access to programs in their communities. She created an endowment for a dedicated dance teacher at Inner-City Arts in East L.A. and provided funds for more than 17,000 kids to take free dance classes there each year.

The Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center — a 299-seat, multi-use performing arts space, including classrooms, rehearsal rooms and a theater — opened two years ago at Vista Del Mar Child and Family Services, a nonprofit that provides mental health services for neurodivergent children and those experiencing behavioral disorders. Kaufman’s gift came with the launch of three new community-focused programs: a USC Alumni Residency, an L.A. Independent Choreographer Residency and UniverSoul Hip Hop Outreach.

The Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center at Vista Del Mar was founded with the announcement of three new programs: a choreography residency, a USC alumni residency and a partnership with UniverSOUL Hip Hop.

(Nic Lehoux)

Glorya Kaufman was born in Detroit to Samuel and Eva Pinkis. Her father was the production manager of Automotive News and her mother was a homemaker who held leadership roles at various charities within the Jewish community. In interviews throughout her life, Kaufman recalled early memories of dancing while standing on her father’s toes. She also loved to go to Detroit’s many jazz clubs, which informed her lifelong love of music and dance.

Kaufman was diagnosed with strabismus as a child. The condition — which causes one eye to look in a different direction than the other — and her early experiences trying to correct the issue, along with her struggles with poor vision, contributed to her interest in helping those with disabilities.

In 1954 Kaufman married Donald Bruce Kaufman, a builder and entrepreneur who in 1957 partnered with businessman and prominent philanthropist Eli Broad to co-found a homebuilding company called Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home). In 1963 the Kaufman family moved to Huntington Harbour after the company expanded to California. Three years later, they again moved to Beverly Hills. In 1969 the Kaufmans relocated to a 48-acre Brentwood ranch they called Amber Hill.

In 1983, Donald died in a plane crash with the couple’s son-in-law Eyal Horwitz while piloting an experimental biplane. To deal with her loss, Glorya threw herself into philanthropy. She created the Glorya Kaufman Foundation and dedicated its first major project — the 10,000-square-foot Donald Bruce Kaufman Brentwood Branch Library — to her late husband, a prolific reader.

Kaufman is survived by her four children, Curtis, Gayl, Laura and Zuade; 10 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.