The Broad (pronounced “brode”) is a brand new museum of modern art in downtown Los Angeles next door to the Walt Disney Concert Hall. A philanthropic couple in Los Angeles donated their 2,000 piece collection and the museum was born earlier this year.
The outside of the museum itself is just wondrous with the design acting as a light filter on the inside so that the works of art aren’t seeing direct sunlight while providing a very open and airy feeling to the galleries.
The museum itself is not terribly large but contains some wonderful pieces. If you’re coming to Los Angeles make sure your pre-order tickets (they’re free) otherwise you may not get in as the standby line wrapped around the block when we walked in.
Thankfully we had our tickets!
Here now here are some of our favorite pieces.
As always you can’t resist Roy Liechtenstein — they had several of his pieces but this one was our favorite.
Robert Thierren’s “Under the Table” is a dining room set that is 4x actual size. Makes you feel like a kid again!
This mural is a five panel piece by a Los Angeles artist name Lari Pittman. It was simply amazing and the longer you stood in front of it the more engaged you were.
Here is a closeup of one portion of the mural. It’s painted on mahogany panels which give it the “flat” appearance. Wonderful!
Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” is entirely whimsical.
Another of our favorites actually was a video installation by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson called “The Visitors”, which is tough to reproduce here. It is composed of nine separate video streams that are projects on nine walls that generally face each other. In each video stream is a musical artist playing their part of the larger song. But all the video streams are playing at the same time so the effect is one where it as though they are playing together.
Here is the panel that describes the piece. Really, really fabulous and probably was our most favorite in the entire museum.
Definitely go if you can. Get free tickets in advance at thebroad.org.
