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By Robert Haywood | Photography by Mike Kelly
Los Angeles is known around the world as the city where films and stars are made. It is a city where your waiter may be an aspiring musician or actor. It is a city of inventive cuisine, beaches, congested freeways, and a place that possesses all the challenges and opportunities of a large metropolitan center with a diverse population. It is also a city with some of the finest art museums and museum architecture in the world: The Getty Museum, Getty Villa, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art are all museums with superior collections and exhibitions. The latest museum, which opened in 2015, is the Broad, a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by Diller Scofido + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, the Broad is located next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall designed by Frank Gehry. On these two blocks alone you can experience two of the most significant works of contemporary architecture in the United States. These highly sculptural buildings, though different in material and form, both offer an intensely visceral experience as they embrace you in their surprising openings, folds, and textures.
Museums exist because of philanthropists, people of great wealth who have an enormous passion for art. Yet wealth alone in no way ensures that a person can build a first-class art collection. That requires a spirit of adventure, vision, years of devotion to learning
everything about art, getting to know artists, art historians, and expert consultants, and constant travel to galleries, art fairs, and exhibitions around the world. That is the case of billionaires Eli and Edythe Broad who built this collection of edgy, blue chip art and founded the museum in their name as a gift to the city.
The museum, which has free admission, is popular so it’s a good idea to make a reservation in advance. Millennials, the Los Angeles Times reports, are especially drawn to The Broad with the average age of the audience being 32. This is surely a sign of the openness, curiosity, and cosmopolitan nature of many educated young people today.
Visitors to the museum will see many major contemporary artists, including works by Jasper Johns, Barbara Kruger, Ellsworth Kelly, Mark Bradford, and Kara Walker. An art historian could teach a course on post-WWII art to the present based on this collection alone. You, too, can get an excellent overview of contemporary art in the United States just by visiting this one museum.
Robert Haywood was a Post-Doctoral Residential Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in L.A. and has spent many days visiting museums in the city.
THE BROAD, thebroad.org
Annapolis Home Magazine
Vol. 10, No. 4 2019