Broad Museum, to the right you can see a part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall
Address: 221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA
Website: www.thebroad.org
Telephone: 213-232-6200
“WHAT I LIKED: good light in the galleries
WHAT I MISSED: material and special programs for VIP
Pleas click the “IN SHORT” button to read a summary”
My perfect LA weekend - bright Californian sunshine, blue sky, delicious food, with friends - culminated in a visit to a new exciting museum, The Broad.
About the Museum
The Broad is a new contemporary art museum, founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
It is located in downtown LA, next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall and near the Museum of Contemporary Art.The Broad’s new, impressive building is an additional highlight of architecture in this area.
The museum opened in September 2015 and is home to about 2,000 works of art. The Broad collection specializes in postwar and contemporary international art. I particularly enjoyed works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama´s Infinity Mirrored Room. The museum also features temporary exhibitions in addition to its own collection.
The Building
Situated on a plaza, part of Grand Avenue, the minimalist building structure combines two components: a public exhibition space and a collection storage space called “the vault” taking up the second floor. Its underside creates the ceiling of the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor plate of the exhibition space on the third floor.
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.
A long escalator or a glass elevator take you from the first gallery level to the third floor, allowing you to take a quick look through viewing windows into the vault and the stored collection.
In the galleries a specially designed skylight system lets natural but softened day light enter, so that no direct sunlight ever shines on the artwork.
Top: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gold Griot, 1984
Bottom: Label to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gold Griot
Entrance and Galleries
The entrance is at street level and you will find the ticket counter right in front of you. There was no special material for visually impaired visitors available at the time of my visit, but you can download an app to your smartphone.
After the fun ride on the escalator you will find yourself in a spacious and high ceiling gallery space on the third floor.
The galleries allow easy navigation and offer glare-free light in every room. It is a pleasant experience to walk through the collection.
Audio Guide and Labels
There is no audio guide available but a Broad app can be downloaded to smartphones and other devices. The app offers several self-guided audio tours: Architecture; Artists on Artists; Inside the Broad Collection; a Kids Audio Tour, and usually also a tour of the current exhibition.
I focused on the ‘Inside the Broad Collection’ tour and tried to find my way to the featured artworks. As I had not familiarized myself with the app beforehand, I had some troubles working with it. The magnification I needed to use did not allow me to see the full content of the screen. It was hard for me to find the paintings in the different rooms. There are no numbers for the audio guide, you have to find the paintings by the small thumbnail photo of the artwork on the app. Locating these on the map of the app was visually too confusing for me while navigating at the same time.
I very much liked the text on the audio guide, although there is no verbal description available. Especially the ‘Artists on Artists’ tour was fascinating, because you get some insight into the thoughts of artists about the work of fellow artists. Also listening to Eli and Edythe Broad talking about their collecting process is thrilling.
The labels are black on white and the font is a little too small for me to read easily. As always in these instances, I took a photo and read them on my smartphone.
Top: Screenshot from app: Content of Audio Tour
Bottom: Screenshot from app: one stop on the Audio Tour, Jasper Johns: Flag
Last but Not Least
My visit to the Broad was very enjoyable and satisfying. To write this blog entry, I worked a lot with the app and now I feel confident to go back and have a full experience of the collection on my own.
Unfortunately there is no program of whatsoever for visually impaired and blind people. The collection has such a wide range of artists and artwork that it is a pity that there are no accessibility programs available at this point in time.
Top: Keith Haring: Red Room, 1988
Bottom: Label to Keith Haring, Red Room