Founded in 2015 with a mandate from philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad to build a large audience for contemporary art, the museum has far exceeded its own projections, having welcomed more than 5.5 million visitors to date and now regularly attracting nearly four times more visitors than originally envisioned.
The expansion, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the acclaimed 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.
Joanne Heyler commented, “In the brief period since 2015, our building has become an icon in Los Angeles’s cultural and civic landscape. With this expansion, we intend to amplify The Broad’s commitment to access for all to contemporary art, offering surprising, welcoming, and imaginative experiences that honor the diversity of our public and add to the ever-growing vitality of Grand Avenue, the area that Eli Broad believed in so strongly and that he helped transform into what it is today.”
The Broad collection comprises more than 2,000 artworks from the 1950s to today and is well known for its large number of influential artists whose work is held in career-spanning depth, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Roy Lichtenstein, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and many others. As the collection grows, it increasingly includes artists and perspectives that were historically left out of the canon and the art market, while building on existing strengths in American Pop art and socially and politically themed works across painting, sculpture, new media, and installation. Artists recently added to the collection include Katherine Bernhardt, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Patrick Martinez, Sabine Moritz, Martin Puryear, Amy Sherald, Cauleen Smith, Mickalene Thomas, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others.
Main Image :Rendering of the planned Broad expansion as seen from Hope Street. The new structure will be behind the existing Grand Avenue museum. (Courtesy of the Broad / Diller Scofidio + Renfro)