The art collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad has never been on permanent view to the public, but now The Broad has given it a home.
Husband and wife Eli and Edythe Broad have been collecting art for more than five decades. Their funding of projects related to education, science, medicine and the arts has been made possible by Eli Broad’s five-decade career in business, where he started off in house building.
In 1984, they set up The Broad Art Foundation, which is dedicated to loaning artwork to museums around the world. This marked the beginning of the Broads’ efforts to make their collection publicly accessible. Building The Broad – a gallery with free admission – is an extension of that mission.
What are The Broad’s aims?
The Broad makes its collection of contemporary art from the 1950s to the present accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting engaging exhibitions and operating a lending programme to art museums and galleries worldwide.
We also aim to continue to build a dynamic collection that features representations of influential contemporary artists.
We’re expanding the collection by about one work per week.
What is the exhibition programme like?
The inaugural installation of the Broad collection is in both our first- and third-floor gallery spaces. In 2016, the third floor will continue to be dedicated to the Broad collection, but the first floor will house temporary exhibitions.
The first display is chronological, showing 250 artworks dating from the 1950s to now, drawn exclusively from the collection. We’ve never been able to display the collection in as much depth before so it is wonderful to put together such a comprehensive show.
Why does the building look like it does?
Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) designed a building that embodies our history as a lending library. The concept includes two architectural gestures – the veil and the vault – that combine The Broad’s two key purposes, the public exhibition spaces and the storage that supports our lending activities.
The heavy opaque mass of the vault is always in view – its carved underside shapes the lobby walls and ceiling, the centre contains the collection storage areas, and the top surface is the floor of the third- floor galleries.
DS+R made the vault the protagonist of our building, allowing visitors to move through, under, on top of and around it during their visits. Rather than relegate storage to a back-of-house function, DS+R put it at the centre of the building and placed viewing windows into the painting storage room, straight into the heart of the vault.
The vault is enveloped by the veil, a porous, honeycomb-like, exterior structure that sits on top like a shell and filters natural daylight through.
How much of the collection is on show at any one time? Of the 2,000 works in the collection, there will always be about 200 on view, with an additional number shown in museums around the world.
What is The Broad’s education programme like?
The public programming is in the spirit of our Un-Private Collection talk series, which launched in 2013 and attracts audiences of up to 2,000 to each event. The series brings artists featured in our collection together with leading voices in other artistic fields.
It’s about dialogue and bringing diverse voices into conversation with the rich trove of topics and practices you see in the Broad collection. This month we also launch events featuring performance, music and film.
For families and schoolchildren, we will have free weekends on a quarterly basis and, beginning in 2016, The Broad will offer schools the opportunity to visit the museum through guided learning programmes that we are developing with local LA arts organisations.
What’s your digital offer?
The Broad offers a free mobile app with audioguides for visitors to explore the collection. With additional text, audio and video content about the artists and artworks on view, and opportunities to learn more about the building’s architecture, the app has been created to enhance the museum experience.
The audioguides aren’t your typical museum tours. There are four initial tours available: Artists on Artists, featuring collection artists talking about pieces in the Broad collection; a collection highlights tour with commentary from founders Eli and Edythe Broad and myself; an architecture tour by Elizabeth Diller, partner-in- charge at DS+R; and Looking with LeVar, a family audio tour narrated by award-winning actor, director and education advocate LeVar Burton.
What are the highlights?
Choosing a favourite work is like choosing a favourite child. I don’t have favourite art pieces or artists, but I love one particular wall in the current installation where three Roy Lichtenstein works are hung together, providing a mini survey of what the artist was doing in the early and mid-1960s. It looks particularly beautiful within the building’s striking architecture.
What makes The Broad different?
The building is an architectural landmark, situated at the vibrant centre of a complex region of more than 15 million people in southern California, and we offer free general admission. These things are not unique to us, but are certainly not typical of every museum.
A lot of the artworks on show are making their debut in Los Angeles: for instance, Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored room, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.
In a general sense, the collection reflects one couple’s vision over 50 years of collecting art. It’s a personal vision, which is unusual for a museum of this size.
A museum featuring the collection of one serious donor can have a meaningful place in the larger, thriving cultural ecosystem of a city like LA, and we spend every working day striving to make that happen.
Cost: $140m
Main funder: Eli and Edythe Broad Architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro Executive architect Gensler
Construction: Matt Construction Structural engineer Nabih Youssef Associates; Leslie E Robertson Associates
Civil engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers Gallery lighting Arup Lighting design Tillotson Design: Graphic design 2 x 4: Keith & Co
Husband and wife Eli and Edythe Broad have been collecting art for more than five decades. Their funding of projects related to education, science, medicine and the arts has been made possible by Eli Broad’s five-decade career in business, where he started off in house building.
In 1984, they set up The Broad Art Foundation, which is dedicated to loaning artwork to museums around the world. This marked the beginning of the Broads’ efforts to make their collection publicly accessible. Building The Broad – a gallery with free admission – is an extension of that mission.
What are The Broad’s aims?
The Broad makes its collection of contemporary art from the 1950s to the present accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting engaging exhibitions and operating a lending programme to art museums and galleries worldwide.
We also aim to continue to build a dynamic collection that features representations of influential contemporary artists.
We’re expanding the collection by about one work per week.
What is the exhibition programme like?
The inaugural installation of the Broad collection is in both our first- and third-floor gallery spaces. In 2016, the third floor will continue to be dedicated to the Broad collection, but the first floor will house temporary exhibitions.
The first display is chronological, showing 250 artworks dating from the 1950s to now, drawn exclusively from the collection. We’ve never been able to display the collection in as much depth before so it is wonderful to put together such a comprehensive show.
Why does the building look like it does?
Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) designed a building that embodies our history as a lending library. The concept includes two architectural gestures – the veil and the vault – that combine The Broad’s two key purposes, the public exhibition spaces and the storage that supports our lending activities.
The heavy opaque mass of the vault is always in view – its carved underside shapes the lobby walls and ceiling, the centre contains the collection storage areas, and the top surface is the floor of the third- floor galleries.
DS+R made the vault the protagonist of our building, allowing visitors to move through, under, on top of and around it during their visits. Rather than relegate storage to a back-of-house function, DS+R put it at the centre of the building and placed viewing windows into the painting storage room, straight into the heart of the vault.
The vault is enveloped by the veil, a porous, honeycomb-like, exterior structure that sits on top like a shell and filters natural daylight through.
How much of the collection is on show at any one time? Of the 2,000 works in the collection, there will always be about 200 on view, with an additional number shown in museums around the world.
What is The Broad’s education programme like?
The public programming is in the spirit of our Un-Private Collection talk series, which launched in 2013 and attracts audiences of up to 2,000 to each event. The series brings artists featured in our collection together with leading voices in other artistic fields.
It’s about dialogue and bringing diverse voices into conversation with the rich trove of topics and practices you see in the Broad collection. This month we also launch events featuring performance, music and film.
For families and schoolchildren, we will have free weekends on a quarterly basis and, beginning in 2016, The Broad will offer schools the opportunity to visit the museum through guided learning programmes that we are developing with local LA arts organisations.
What’s your digital offer?
The Broad offers a free mobile app with audioguides for visitors to explore the collection. With additional text, audio and video content about the artists and artworks on view, and opportunities to learn more about the building’s architecture, the app has been created to enhance the museum experience.
The audioguides aren’t your typical museum tours. There are four initial tours available: Artists on Artists, featuring collection artists talking about pieces in the Broad collection; a collection highlights tour with commentary from founders Eli and Edythe Broad and myself; an architecture tour by Elizabeth Diller, partner-in- charge at DS+R; and Looking with LeVar, a family audio tour narrated by award-winning actor, director and education advocate LeVar Burton.
What are the highlights?
Choosing a favourite work is like choosing a favourite child. I don’t have favourite art pieces or artists, but I love one particular wall in the current installation where three Roy Lichtenstein works are hung together, providing a mini survey of what the artist was doing in the early and mid-1960s. It looks particularly beautiful within the building’s striking architecture.
What makes The Broad different?
The building is an architectural landmark, situated at the vibrant centre of a complex region of more than 15 million people in southern California, and we offer free general admission. These things are not unique to us, but are certainly not typical of every museum.
A lot of the artworks on show are making their debut in Los Angeles: for instance, Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirrored room, The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.
In a general sense, the collection reflects one couple’s vision over 50 years of collecting art. It’s a personal vision, which is unusual for a museum of this size.
A museum featuring the collection of one serious donor can have a meaningful place in the larger, thriving cultural ecosystem of a city like LA, and we spend every working day striving to make that happen.
Project data
Cost: $140m
Main funder: Eli and Edythe Broad Architect Diller Scofidio + Renfro Executive architect Gensler
Construction: Matt Construction Structural engineer Nabih Youssef Associates; Leslie E Robertson Associates
Civil engineer: KPFF Consulting Engineers Gallery lighting Arup Lighting design Tillotson Design: Graphic design 2 x 4: Keith & Co
