Adding to your list of cool things you should do one day!

The Broad, a new contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles, is home to some of the most intriguing art you will ever see. The Broad is located on Grand avenue next to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Getting to the museum before it opens would help visitors because, due to its popularity, the wait is long. Or, even visit on a day during the week instead of the weekend.

As you enter the galleries, one room plays a short video giving background on the museum and its creators. Eli And Edythe Broad were recently married when they found a passion for art and sculptures. This passion grew immensely and so they started The Broad Art Foundation in 1984. Their goal: to collect artwork and make it more accessible for the public, and thus bring more opportunities for what art can become. The foundation, similar to a library, loans pieces to other public museums to help make their artwork more accessible to the public. The Broad Art Foundation has made 8,000 loans to 500 public museums worldwide.

Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in partnership with Gensler, the museum is set up as though it is a veil and a vault. The Swiss cheese like veil is made of fiberglass, and the top of the structure has 318 skylights to flood the top gallery floor with natural light. The vault, made of 36 million pounds of concrete, holds all the artwork, and from the outside it looks as though it hovers in the middle.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-fall-arts-broad-info-20150913-story.html

The first level displays works from artists such as Robert Longo and Takashi Murakami. It is also home of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. This exhibit is said to be extraordinary, yet without a scheduled reservation time you cannot get it. So, my dad and I chose to come back another time to see it instead of waiting for four hours.

As you travel up stairs, you can either take the escalator or the glass enclosed tubular elevator. The escalator takes you directly to the third floor displaying popular pieces from Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, and Kara Walker. The cylindrical elevator does stop at the second floor, which holds the main screen room, administration offices, artwork prep areas, and not to mention storage for the hundreds of other pieces of artwork not displayed.

As this tubular elevator takes you up to the airy and open third floor you are immediately greeted by a display from Jeff Koons called Tulips.

Koons- Tulips, Nicole Jackson 17’

The walls around Tulips show Christopher Wool’s untitled work. RUN DOG RUN RUN RUN DOG is shown here, and Wool’s nine aluminum panels and stenciled letters transform these simple three letter words to have a sight delay and a split second sense of unfamiliarity.

As you walk through different sections of the third floor, you encounter artwork, some of which is up to interpretation, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat’s untitled work finished in 1981 or Keith Haring’s, 1988 piece, Red Room.

Basquiat – Untitled                                             Haring – Red Room

Nicole Jackson ‘17

Other artist challenge society in the past and criticize society today. Glen Lion’s 1993 Piece called Runaways depicts separate stories of runaway slaves in the south during slavery. Barbara Kruger’s 1989 untitled piece was produced to show support for the Women’s March on Washington and how women deserve the right to their own bodies and reproduction.

Lion- Runaways                                                                                                Kruger- Untitled

Nicole Jackson ‘17

Having a history of finding museums particularly boring, I was pleasantly surprised, if not shocked, about how enjoyable The Broad was. This Modern-contemporary art never ceases to lose your interest, and to note that the building within itself is a piece of art, the museum is a must see and should be added to your list of “things I am going to do one day when I am not doing anything else.”