Inside The Broad, LA's Newest Contemporary Art Museum

Back in September, I attended the press preview of The Broad, the new contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles. It was a pop art lover’s dream! Works by Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Takashi Murakami were all on display.

The show stopper, however, was The Infinity Mirrored Room by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. (See above.) I’m still daydreaming about it. Imagine being able to step into space and be surrounded by an endless array of stars. You walk into a room that’s lined with mirrors and strung with thousands of LED lights. The ground is covered in water, save for a platform you walk on. You have 30 seconds to fully immerse yourself in the experience. I’m sure I was not alone in thinking, “Is this what heaven feels like?”

Dynamically changing LA’s urban landscape, The Broad’s architecture is, in and of itself, a beauty to behold. Design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s (DS+R) concept was “a veil and a vault.” As you walk down the stairs, you can look through large glass windows to see art pieces hung on racks and shelves, it’s the storage area around which the museum was built. (The Broad is showing just 250 of their more than 2,000 works.) This is referred to as the vault. The outermost structure is a lattice-like veil that lets light shine into the building in a beautifully natural way. I was surprised that the third-floor skylights could bring in such perfect indirect, diffused light.

The Broad is named after the billionaire businessman and avid art collector Eli Broad and his wife Edythe. (Yes, that’s Broad of homebuilding company Kaufman & Broad.) Their mission is to make art accessible to everyone, that’s why general admission is free!

Make sure you visit this new art institution in LA. It’ll be well worth your time.