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The Broad Expansion Founding Director Eli and Edythe Broad Collection The Broad Art Foundation Press
Photo of the exterior of The Broad at sunset

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.

Diversity Apprenticeship Program

As part of the museum's commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity, The Broad created the Diversity Apprenticeship Program to provide opportunities for people to gain the training and experience they need to pursue rewarding careers in the art world, and to increase respect for the field of art handling as a profession.

The Building

The main elements of The Broad's design, the "veil" and the "vault"

The Building

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.

The East West Bank Plaza at The Broad

Directly south of the museum is a public plaza also designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Hood Design Studio, Inc. The landscaping features 100-year-old Barouni olive trees and an open lawn, adding another parcel of critical green space to Grand Avenue.

Timelapse Video

Sustainability Initiatives

The U.S. Green Building Council awarded The Broad a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification for LEED New Construction in 2016. This achievement recognized The Broad’s energy-saving design features and continuing commitment to sustainable practices. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, and built by MATT Construction, The Broad was the first major art museum in Los Angeles and one of only a handful of museums nationwide to achieve LEED Gold status. Energy-efficient elements and practices in the museum range from having 10 electric vehicle charging stations and offering employees monthly stipends to encourage the use of mass transit or to walk or bike to work, to a 35,000-square-foot top floor gallery that most days is illuminated by natural diffused light from skylights, meaning limited use of electric lighting. There are also rooftop drains that route rainwater to street-level gardens and high-efficiency plumbing fixtures. In addition, with easy walking access to residential and commercial buildings, restaurants, and other cultural amenities and close proximity to public transit and adjacency to the Metro Regional Connector station at the corner of 2nd and Hope streets, The Broad aims to be in the top tier of eco-conscious, efficient, and sustainable museums.

LEED Certification Broad Museum and Garage Scorecard

The Future Expansion

Broad Expansion Mockup

The Future Expansion

Situated on Hope Street, The Broad’s future gallery and programming space will bring you closer to artworks you can see in depth only at The Broad—by Andy Warhol,  Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Kara Walker, and so many others—as well as artists new to the collection—such as Cauleen Smith, Lauren Halsey, and Patrick Martinez. New, outdoor, top-floor courtyards, and flexible live programming spaces to encounter boundary-breaking performances and concerts, will round out a visit to The Broad of the future.  

The museum will remain open during construction; when the new building opens to the public before Los Angeles hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics, general admission will continue to be free.

Read the Expansion Announcement Press Release

About the Design

The expansion, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the architects of the existing museum, opens a new perspective on the “veil and vault” concept they introduced in 2015, with the building’s iconic white honeycomb “veil” enveloping the “vault,” the sculptural grey core that contains art storage. The exterior of the expansion echoes the surface appearance of the vault—as if this core had been exposed and “unveiled”—symbolically expressing The Broad’s commitment to access while playfully inverting the visual vocabulary of the current building. Inside the addition, there will be large new galleries on the first, second, and third floors, as well as second-floor spaces in which visitors will be able to move among racks filled with artworks from the collection, creating a zone that serves simultaneously as gallery and art storage.

Expansion Features

The expansion will reinforce the open, inventive, and welcoming qualities for which the museum is known, while adding entirely new facets for visitors to discover. The expansion offers: 

  • Space to dramatically increase the number of collection artworks on view. The expansion’s 55,000 square feet of new construction increases The Broad’s galleries by 70% and allows visitors to see more of the museum’s growing collection, including its uniquely deep and extensive single-artist holdings. 
  • Two top-floor, open-air courtyards to gather, relax, and enjoy art outdoors. 
  • Flexible live programming space to encounter boundary-breaking performances, concerts, or multimedia installations, or participate in a family weekend workshop or school program. 
  • A new experience of the art storage vault that invites visitors into a room with painting racks, allowing unexpected themes to emerge as various works are pulled out from visit to visit.

 

Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President

Joanne Heyler, Founding Director

Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President

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. 

As the director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation, Ms. Heyler worked closely with the late Eli Broad for more than two decades, overseeing the majority of the foundation’s collection’s growth. During her tenure more than 100 artists have entered the collection, building deep representations of work by crucial postwar figures like Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, as well as work by more recent figures such as Mark Bradford, Sharon Lockhart, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall and others. Building on Broad’s legacy since his passing in 2021, she is increasing new artists in the collection such as Mickalene Thomas, Amy Sherald, Patrick Martinez and Sayre Gomez. Ms. Heyler also oversees the foundation's lending library, expanding the reach of the program to more than 9,000 loans to over 600 museums and galleries worldwide since its founding in 1984.

In addition, Ms. Heyler has helped guide the Broads’ major philanthropic investments in the visual arts locally and nationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. 

Ms. Heyler received her bachelor’s degree in art history from Scripps College and a master’s degree in the history of art from the Courtauld Institute of London University. In 2017, she was included in Los Angeles magazine’s “11 Women Who are Making L.A. a Better Place” alongside advocates, entrepreneurs, and trailblazers. Ms. Heyler and her family live in South Pasadena.

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Eli and Edythe Broad

Eli and Edythe Broad

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.

Mr. Broad was the founding chairman and a life trustee of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, to which The Broad Foundation gave a $30 million challenge grant in December 2008 to rebuild the museum’s endowment and to provide exhibition support. He was a life trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Broads made a $60 million gift to build the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in February 2008, and to fund an art acquisition budget. 

Tireless advocates of Los Angeles, the Broads championed the cultural and architectural vitality of the city. Committed to the belief that all great cities need a vibrant center, Mr. Broad was the visionary behind the development of Grand Avenue, which will blend residential, retail, cultural and recreational uses into a civic centerpiece to rival the main boulevards of the world’s greatest cities. In 1996, Mr. Broad and then-Mayor Richard Riordan spearheaded the fundraising campaign to build the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened to worldwide acclaim in October 2003. The Broads provided the lead gift to the Los Angeles Opera to create a new production of Richard Wagner’s four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen in 2009-2010. In 2008, they created an endowment for programming and arts education at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage and The Edye Second Space at the Santa Monica College performing arts center.

From 2004 to 2009, Mr. Broad served as a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution by appointment of the U.S. Congress and the President. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1994 was named Chevalier in the National Order of the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France. Mr. Broad served on the board of the Future Generation Art Prize. He received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2007 and the David Rockefeller Award from the Museum of Modern Art in March 2009. Strong believers in higher education, the Broads further extended their philanthropy in the arts. The Broad Foundation made a major contribution to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA for The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. In 1991, the Broads endowed The Eli Broad College of Business and The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University (MSU), where Mr. Broad graduated cum laude in 1954. In June 2007, the Broads announced a $26 million gift to create the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, and they gave another $2 million to the project in January 2010. The Zaha Hadid-designed museum opened in November 2012.

Mr. Broad's book, The Art of Being Unreasonable: Lessons in Unconventional Thinking, was published by Wiley in May 2012 and is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller. 

Mr. Broad died at the age of 87 on April 30, 2021. He is survived by his wife Edythe and their sons Jeffrey and Gary.

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Eli and Edythe Broad

the collection

the collection

Eli and Edythe Broad built their collection of postwar and contemporary art over the last 50 years. Believing that the greatest art collections are built when the art is being made, the Broads took to collecting art of their own time.

The Broad is home to over 2,000 works in the Broad collection by nearly 200 artists, and is one of the world’s leading collections of postwar and contemporary art. The collection features in-depth holdings of influential contemporary artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Takashi Murakami, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and more, plus an ever-growing representation of younger artists.

Browse Collection

The Broad Art Foundation

The Broad Art Foundation

The museum is also home to 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. The foundation has loaned artworks to museums more than 9,000 times, worldwide.

How to Make a Loan Request

The Broad Art Foundation considers written loan requests from accredited institutions, or those whose staff and facilities are similarly qualified. The borrowing institution is required to undertake all costs for packing, transporting, handling and insuring the artworks in transit to and from all venues and during exhibition of the works. Requests are considered on an individual basis and the Foundation's decision to lend is based upon the pertinence of the artworks to the content of the exhibition, the prior loan commitments of the requested artworks, the fragility of the artwork, and the Foundation's goal of exposure to the widest or neediest audiences. Most often, the Foundation gives preferred consideration to lending one work or a small grouping of works to augment major one-person or thematic exhibitions which have a tour schedule of several venues. Periodically, the long-term loan of one or two artworks to individual institutions may be arranged.

The Foundation's photographic archives include digital images of nearly all works, enabling us to supply visual material to potential borrowing institutions.

For loan requests, please contact Anne Mersmann, Director of Collections Management, at amersmann@thebroad.org.

 

The Broad photo by Iwan Baan

Press

Press Releases

Collage of events
10/31/2024
The Broad Announces New Events and Programs for All Ages That Reimagine Joseph Beuys’s Activist Legacy for Los Angeles
Image credit: Joseph Beuys, Difesa della natura (Defense of Nature), 1984. Color offset on heavy paper. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo by Joshua White/JWPictures.com
07/11/2024
The Broad’s Fall 2024 Exhibition Joseph Beuys: In Defense of Nature Foregrounds Social Reconciliation, Cultural Memory, and Environmental Justice in the Artist’s Work
Image credit: Flo Milli. Courtesy of RCA Records
05/20/2024
The Broad Announces Dynamic Season of Programming for Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

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