The Broad

How to Get There

Head northwest on W 1st St toward N Spring St. Turn left onto S Olive St. Turn right onto W 2nd St. Destination will be on the left.

Overview

The Broad is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building which houses the Broad art collections. The museum offers free general admission to its permanent collection galleries. It opened on September 20, 2015.

The Broad houses a nearly 2,000-piece collection of contemporary art, featuring 200 artists, including works by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, the latter including a 1963 "Single Elvis". The Broads suggested in 2015 that it was acquiring the "Single Elvis" which sent the price of pop art to unprecedented levels.

Other notable installations include Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), Ragnar Kjartansson's expansive nine-screen video The Visitors (2012), Julie Mehretu's 24-feet-wide canvas Beloved (Cairo) (2013), and Goshka Macuga's photo-tapestry Death of Marxism, Women of All Lands Unite (2013). With currently 129 pieces, the museum owns the largest collection of Cindy Sherman works worldwide.

History

In August 2010, Eli Broad announced formally that he would build a museum in Downtown Los Angeles. Diller Scofidio + Renfro were eventually chosen to design the approximately 120,000-square-foot museum, which includes exhibition space, offices and a parking garage. The museum was opened by the Broads on September 20, 2015.

Architecture

The Broad is housed in a new building designed by architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. With a location adjacent to Frank Gehry's iconic Walt Disney Concert Hall, the museum's design is intended to contrast with its bright metallic perforated exterior while respecting its architectural presence by having a porous, "honeycomblike" exterior. The building design is based on a concept entitled "the veil and the vault". "The veil" is a porous envelope that wraps the whole building, filtering and transmitting daylight to the indoor space. This skin is made of 2,500 rhomboidal panels made in fiberglass reinforced concrete supported by a 650-ton steel substructure. "The vault" is a concrete body which forms the core of the building, dedicated to artworks storage, laboratories, curatorial spaces and offices.

The three-story museum features 50,000 square feet of exhibition space on two floors, with 35,000 square feet of column-free gallery space on the third floor and 15,000 square feet more on the first. The roof has 318 skylight monitors that let in diffused sunlight from the north. In the non-Euclidean lobby, there is no front desk; instead, visitor-services associates greet guests with mobile devices. Lobby and exhibitions spaces are connected by a 105-foot escalator and a glass-enclosed elevator.

Exhibitions

The Broad's inaugural exhibition is to feature a selection of more than 250 paintings, sculptures and photographs by more than 60 artists drawn exclusively from the permanent collection, including John Ahearn, El Anatsui, Richard Artschwager, John Baldessari, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Mark Bradford, Chris Burden, Chuck Close, John Currin, Eric Fischl, Jack Goldstein, Mark Grotjahn, Keith Haring, Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly (four paintings), William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Ragnar Kjartansson, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Sherrie Levine, Roy Lichtenstein (10 paintings), Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Robert Longo, Goshka Macuga, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Lari Pittman, Richard Prince, Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Mark Tansey, Robert Therrien, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol (11 paintings), David Wojnarowicz and Christopher Wool.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "The Broad", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0