The Broad contemporary art museum opens its doors to a curious public Sunday eager to get a peek at the new $140 million home of the 2,000-piece art collection built over several decades by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and wife, Edye.
With more than 105,000 advance tickets already booked through to the end of the year, large crowds are expected to continue flowing in over the coming months, museum officials said.
The Broad’s inaugural exhibit features works by Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, Kara Walker and Takashi Murakami — all part of a collection that the Broads have been loaning out to other venues around the world for the past 30 years.
Also on display is one of the Broads’ latest acquisitions, Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Room — the Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.” The piece, made up of multi-colored LED. lights reflected by mirrors inside a 200-square-foot room, can only be viewed one person at a time.
In addition to the art, the museum’s architecture will likely be a highlight for patrons. The design, by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, features a white latticed exterior wrapped around a cool subterranean-like interior.
Architect Elizabeth Diller, the principal at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, said the “porous and matte” feel of The Broad creates a “relationship of contrasts” with the “smooth and shiny” attributes of its neighbor, the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
The three-story building includes 50,000 of gallery space and a 21,000 square foot “vault” — seemingly suspended at the center of the structure — that house all 2,000 or so pieces of The Broad’s collection, with the exception of a life-sized fire truck.
Curator and founding director Joanne Heyler said she took a “straightforward, wide-lens chronological approach” to showing off the Broads’ art collection in the inaugural show.
She said the museum provides an opportunity to offer a comprehensive look at a collection that has only “been seen in fragments over the years.”
The collection includes a “deep concentration” of pop art from the 1950s and 1960s, providing “a truly unique opportunity to experience these rare master works free,” she said.
Broad said the art collection stored and shown at the museum was built over nearly 50 years and fueled by an interest in art acquisition that became “not only a passion, but also an addiction.”
It was particularly important for the museum to bring more recent art to a wider audience, Broad said.
“Contemporary art is the art of our time,” he said. “It reflects an important social, political and cultural commentary on the world in which we live.”
To illustrate this point, Broad cited familiar Warhol pieces depicting pop culture icons like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, and Barbara Kruger’s feminist statement piece “Your Body is a Battleground” that served as “a symbol of the 1980s women’s march on Washington.”
Also on display is a charcoal drawing by Robert Longo showing a hazy scene of riot police in Ferguson, Missouri, providing commentary that is especially relevant in the present day, Broad said.
The Broad, at 221 S. Grand Ave., will be open from11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. Doors open at 10 a.m. on weekends, closing at 8 p.m. on Saturdays, and 6 p.m. on Sundays. The museum will be closed on Mondays, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.
— City News Service