The Broad – Los Angeles California

The Broad - The Broad makes its collection of contemporary art from the 1950s to the present accessible to the widest possible audience by presenting exhibitions and operating a lending program to art museums and galleries worldwide.

By actively building a dynamic collection that features in-depth representations of influential contemporary artists and by advancing education and engagement through exhibitions and diverse public programming, the museum enriches, provokes, inspires, and fosters appreciation of art of our time.

The Broad was founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the museum offers free general admission and presents an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement. The Broad is home to over 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is one of the world’s leading collections of postwar and contemporary art.

The 120,000-square-foot building features two floors of gallery space and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library, which has been loaning collection works to museums around the world since 1984. The Broad welcomes more than 900,000 visitors from around the world per year.

Architecture
The Broad is designed by world-renowned architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140 million building features two floors of gallery space to showcase the Broad’s comprehensive collection and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library.

Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and collection storage. Rather than relegate the storage to secondary status, the “vault,” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit. Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor plate of the exhibition space. The vault stores the portions of the collection not on display in the galleries or on loan, but DS+R provided viewing windows so visitors can get a sense of the intensive depth of the collection and peer right into the storage holding. The vault is enveloped on all sides by the “veil,” an airy, honeycomb-like structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight.

Joanne Heyler
Founding Director and President, The Broad
Director and Chief Curator, The Broad Art Foundation

Joanne Heyler is founding director and president of The Broad, a contemporary art museum co-founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad in downtown Los Angeles seven years ago. In addition to her role at The Broad, she serves as the director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation, which was created in 1984 as a pioneering lending library dedicated to increasing public access to contemporary art through an enterprising loan program and is now headquartered at the museum.

Committed to the Broads’ longtime mission of making contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience, Ms. Heyler leads The Broad museum with innovative and inclusive approaches to museum programming, audience engagement, and visitor experience. The first entirely new major museum founded in Los Angeles in almost 20 years, Ms. Heyler oversaw every aspect of The Broad’s development from inception. She worked closely with architectural designers Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Gensler and numerous specialists to ensure optimal realization of the 120,000-square-foot building, which houses over 2,000 works in the Broad collection. She guides the museum’s special exhibition programming with a focus on social justice, and has brought groundbreaking exhibitions such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” to Los Angeles, as well as Broad-organized monographic shows of artists including William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Takashi Murakami and Keith Haring. The Broad has achieved the Broads’ goal of revitalizing Grand Avenue and has introduced new vast audiences to contemporary art, welcoming nearly 5 million visitors since its 2015 grand opening.

Eli Broad was a renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist who is the only person to found two Fortune 500 companies in different industries, SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home, formerly Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation, and who co-founded with his wife Edythe the contemporary art museum, The Broad.

Eli and Edythe Broad were devoted to philanthropy as founders of The Broad Foundations, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. Today, Edythe Broad continues this visionary work. The Broad Foundations, which include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, have assets of $3 billion. The Broad Art Foundation has loaned artworks to museums more than 9,000 times, worldwide.

Through the foundations, the Broads created groundbreaking independent institutions in each of their three areas of grantmaking, including The Broad Center, which develops leaders to help transform America’s urban public schools; The Broad Institute, a global leader in genomics; and The Broad, which was founded in 2015 as a gift to the city of Los Angeles and is dedicated to making contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience.