The Broad Art Foundation Los Angeles, Santa Monica Building Project Design Image
The Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles Museum
Museum Building in Santa Monica, California design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro architects, USA
May 1, 2021
Eli Broad, Whose Generous Patronage Transformed the Cultural Landscape of Los Angeles and Brought the Arts to Many, Dies at the Age of 87
Eli Broad, Los Angeles, USA:
photo : Ryan Miller © Capture Imaging
The Broad Co-Founder Dies
Los Angeles (April 30, 2021) – Philanthropist and entrepreneur Eli Broad, who is the only person to found two Fortune 500 companies in different industries and who co-founded with his wife Edye the contemporary art museum, The Broad, died at the age of 87, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation announced today.
“Eli saw the arts as a way to strive to build a better world for all. He was a fiercely committed civic leader, and his tenacity and advocacy for the arts indelibly changed Los Angeles. He will long be remembered for his unmatched generosity in sharing the arts passionately and widely,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director of The Broad.
In 1963, the Broads moved to Los Angeles, which became their adopted hometown and the central focus of much of their philanthropy and civic activism. Since moving to Los Angeles, the Broads have played a leading role in making contemporary art and world-class architecture essential to life in the city for residents and visitors. Over his lifetime, Broad and his wife Edye, (who co-founded The Broad Foundations with her husband and serves on the boards for The Broad Foundations, The Broad, and The Broad Art Foundation), have given a total of nearly $1 billion to the city’s arts and culture institutions, in addition to The Broad. Their support of these institutions ushered in a transformational era for the arts in Los Angeles.
Broad led multiple efforts that have made Los Angeles into a global arts and culture capital, including co-founding two different art museums on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and The Broad; spearheading the effort to build the Walt Disney Concert Hall; and playing a catalyzing role in developing the long-fallow Grand Avenue into a cultural center drawing millions from the Los Angeles region and around the world. A tireless civic champion during his life, whose philanthropic legacy also includes education and medicine, Broad had unmatched influence and impact on the arts in Los Angeles. A 2017 profile on Broad in The New York Times noted, “It is difficult to overstate Mr. Broad’s importance to Los Angeles…His contributions to the city’s art and cultural world may well prove the most enduring legacy—particularly for Los Angeles’s now-thriving downtown.”
It was in Los Angeles where the Broads first became interested in collecting art together. After moving to the city, Edye—whose lifelong love of art began in her childhood—began visiting L.A.’s growing constellation of galleries on her own and buying mainly works on paper. But Broad soon joined his wife in collecting art, a passion the couple shared for five decades of their 66-year marriage. “Edye was the first collector in our family, and I came along later—later being some fifty odd years ago. She was my inspiration to collect art,” said Broad. A significant early acquisition was a Vincent Van Gogh drawing acquired in 1972. By the 1980s, however, the Broads had become immersed in contemporary art, believing that by collecting the art of our time, they could create a meaningful art collection and enjoy the innovations and thinking of living artists.
Within the decade, Broad, along with other arts patrons in Los Angeles, helped found and create the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1979. As the founding chairman of MOCA until 1984, Broad played a critical role in establishing the museum. Broad negotiated the purchase of 80 abstract expressionist and pop works from Italian businessman and collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, who was known for being the first European collector of postwar American art and for amassing one of the world’s largest and premiere collections of postwar American art. The 80 works that were purchased formed the core of MOCA’s renowned permanent collection, giving the museum “instant credibility,” according to The New York Times. When Panza died in 2010, Broad told The New York Times, “Having his collection helped us get other works of great quality that we otherwise may not have gotten. I think because of his collection, we were not viewed as another provincial museum but a world-class institution.”
A central goal in the Broads’ philanthropy in the visual arts is public access to their collection. Their first major step in fulfilling this goal was establishing The Broad Art Foundation in 1984, a global lending library dedicated to increasing public access to contemporary art through an enterprising loan program. The foundation has made more than 8,700 loans from the Broads’ personal collection, together with the foundation’s collection, to over 550 museums and galleries around the world.
In the mid-2000s, Broad gave a $60 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to fund a new building dedicated to contemporary art and to support the museum’s contemporary art acquisitions as part of his vision to advance Los Angeles’ reputation as a global arts capital. Designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano, the three-story Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) opened in 2008 and hosts rotating artwork exhibitions within 60,000 square feet of galleries. Later that same year, Broad gave $30 million to MOCA to rebuild its endowment and provide exhibition support when it faced a financial crisis, reinvigorating the institution.
picture : Benny Chan
Since the 1970s, Broad saw potential in Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood as a vibrant cultural center for the Southern California region, and spent decades working to realize this vision. He told the Los Angeles Times in 2019, “A great city needs a vibrant center where people come to enjoy cultural riches like museums, dance, opera, theater, and the symphony, or to take part in civic life at parades, protests, and celebrations.”
In 1996, along with former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, Broad spearheaded the fundraising campaign for the roughly $300 million required to build Walt Disney Concert Hall on Grand Avenue. Designed by Frank Gehry and opened in October 2003, it is the home of the acclaimed Los Angeles Philharmonic and considered an architectural masterpiece. Soon after, Broad helped create the Grand Avenue Project, a joint initiative between the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County tasked with redeveloping certain sections of Bunker Hill. Believing that green space was a vital need in the area, Broad was able to negotiate with the city and county’s chosen developer to secure funds for Grand Park, the public space between City Hall and the Music Center. The park, today a vibrant civic space and site of celebrations, protests, and festivals, was built without requiring any taxpayer money.
Broad was also a longtime supporter of the L.A. Opera (also located on Grand Avenue) with Edye, whose love of opera brings her to downtown Los Angeles for performances, funding a new, critically acclaimed production of Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle in 2009-2010, providing operating support for the company, and endowing the director’s chair.
In addition, Broad helped create the Ramón C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts on Grand Avenue, which was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Wolf D. Prix, the design principal and CEO of the architectural firm COOP HIMMELB(L)AU, who was selected through an architectural competition supported by Broad. A striking presence in downtown Los Angeles, the school serves more than 1,600 students from the surrounding neighborhood and from the city who are aspiring to be the next generation of visual and performing artists.
photo : Iwan Baan
Most significantly, Broad chose Grand Avenue for the home of the museum he co-founded with Edye, The Broad. The Broads had spent nearly 50 years building one of the world’s most significant collections of postwar and contemporary art, and had always wanted to bring contemporary art to the widest possible audience. In August 2010, Broad announced that they would build a new contemporary art museum to fulfill this philanthropic commitment—the first entirely new art institution to be built in Los Angeles in nearly 20 years.
The Broad museum opened in September 2015, revitalizing and driving the area’s transformation into the cultural center that Broad had envisioned, with millions of visitors coming from across the region and around the world to enjoy the rich and lively arts and culture scene along Grand Avenue.
Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The Broad houses approximately 2,000 works of postwar and contemporary art by artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Yayoi Kusama, Kerry James Marshall, Takashi Murakami, Kara Walker, and Cindy Sherman. General admission to The Broad is free, and the museum presents a dynamic schedule of exhibitions and public programs. Broad had anticipated that the museum would attract 250,000 people a year, but the museum, in fact, defied expectations, welcoming more than 900,000 visitors in 2019 alone—three times what Broad expected. Since the museum’s opening, The Broad consistently attracts a strikingly young and diverse audience that reflects the demographics of the L.A. region: approximately 70 percent of The Broad’s visitors identify as non-white, and 66 percent are 35 and under.
Broad’s philanthropy in the arts also included a major contribution to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA for The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. In 1991, the Broads endowed The Eli Broad College of Business and The Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University (MSU), where Broad graduated cum laude in 1954. In June 2007, the Broads announced a $26 million gift to create the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, which was designed by acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid, and they gave another $2 million to the project in January 2010. In 2008, the Broads created a $10 million endowment for programming and arts education at The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage and The Edye Second Space at the Santa Monica College performing arts center.
From 2004 to 2009, Broad served as a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution by appointment of the U.S. Congress and the President, and was a life trustee of MOCA, LACMA, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Broad was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1994 was named Chevalier in the National Order of the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France. Broad served on the board of the Future Generation Art Prize. Broad received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy in 2007 and the David Rockefeller Award from the Museum of Modern Art in 2009. In 2018, the Broads were named Distinguished Philanthropists at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and received the American Federation of the Arts Cultural Leadership Award in 2018. The Broads received honorary degrees from the University of Southern California in 2019.
Broad is survived by his wife Edye and his two sons, Jeffrey and Gary.
The Broad, Santa Monica
About The Broad
The Broad is a contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum offers free general admission and presents an active program of rotating temporary exhibitions and innovative audience engagement, all within a landmark building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler. The Broad is home to 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is one of the world’s leading collections of postwar and contemporary art and welcomes more than 900,000 visitors a year.
The 120,000-square-foot building features two floors of gallery space and is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library, which has been loaning collection works to museums around the world since 1984.
For news and updates, sign up for email newsletters at thebroad.org or follow The Broad on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube
Eli Broad image / information from The Broad Art Foundation Museum Los Angeles
updated Jan 18, 2016 with new images ; Jan 13, 2011
The Broad Art Foundation Los Angeles Building
Architects: Diller Scofidio + Renfro
The Broad Art Foundation Unveils Museum Designs;
Initial Programming Outlined, Board of Governors Announced
Address: The Broad Art Foundation, 3355 Barnard Way, Santa Monica, CA 90405, USA
Opening: September 20, 2015
photo : wikimedia commons
LOS ANGELES – Philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad and architect Elizabeth Diller unveiled the designs of The Broad Art Foundation, a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Designed by world-renowned architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the three-story museum features a unique porous honeycomb “veil” that wraps the building and is visible through an expansive, top floor sky-lit gallery that will be home to great works of contemporary art drawn from the 2,000-piece Broad Collections.
The Broads also announced a 12-member board of governors and the inaugural programming for the contemporary art museum, to be called “The Broad.” “Today, we celebrate another important milestone – the creation of a new museum 40 years in the making,” said Eli Broad, who was flanked by more than 200 city and county officials and community leaders as he revealed the designs for The Broad at a press conference at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
“Grand Avenue is the cultural district for this great region of 15 million people. No other city in the world has such a concentration of visual and performing arts institutions and iconic architecture in a three-block radius. Edye and I can think of no better home for the public art collections we have assembled over the past 40 years.”
Located across the street from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Broad will also serve as the headquarters for the foundation’s worldwide art lending library. In addition to paying for the building, the Broads are funding the museum with a $200 million endowment – larger than the combined endowments of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MOCA.
Joanne Heyler, the director/chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation, will also serve as director of the museum. Featuring almost an acre of column-free gallery space, a lecture hall for up to 200 people, a ground floor multimedia gallery and a public lobby with display space and a museum shop, the 120,000-square-foot project will also include state-of-the-art archive, study and art storage space that will be available to scholars and curators who want to research works in the collection and borrow artworks for their institutions through The Broad Art Foundation.
Dubbed “the veil and the vault,” the museum’s design merges the two key components of the building: public exhibition space and the archive/storage that will support The Broad Art Foundation’s lending activities. Rather than relegate the archive/storage to secondary status, the “vault,” plays a key role in shaping the museum experience from entry to exit.
Its heavy opaque mass is always in view, hovering midway in the building. Its carved underside shapes the lobby below, while its top surface is the floor of the exhibition space. The vault is enveloped on all sides by the “veil,” an airy, cellular exoskeleton structure that spans across the block-long gallery and provides filtered natural daylight.
The public entry to the museum will be on Grand Avenue and will complement the landscaped plaza to the south that is part of the Grand Avenue Project’s master plan. The museum’s “veil” lifts at the corners, welcoming visitors into an active lobby with a bookshop and espresso bar.
Visitors will then journey upwards via an escalator, tunneling through the archive, arriving onto 40,000 square feet of column-free exhibition space bathed in diffuse light. This 24-foot-high space is fully flexible to be shaped into galleries, according to the curatorial needs of each installation or exhibition. Visitors exit the exhibition space and descend back to the lobby through a winding stair through the vault that offers behind-the-scenes glimpses, through viewing windows, into the vast holdings of the Broad Collections and the foundation’s lending library operations.
“Our goal for the museum is to hold its ground next to Gehry’s much larger and very exuberant Walt Disney Concert Hall through contrast,” Diller said. “As opposed to Disney Hall’s smooth and shiny exterior that reflects light, The Broad will be porous and absorptive, channeling light into its public spaces and galleries. The veil will play a role in the urbanization of Grand Avenue by activating two-way views that connect the museum and the street.”
The Broads also announced a 12-person board of governors who will oversee The Broad: William J. Bell, president of Bell-Phillip T.V. Productions, Inc.; Irving Blum, art collector; Deborah Borda, president and CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association; Michael Chow, owner of Mr. Chow Enterprises Ltd.; Paul Frimmer, counsel with Loeb & Loeb LLP; Howard Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; Cindy Quane, senior financial advisor to The Broad Foundations; Robert H. Tuttle, former U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s; and Jay Wintrob, president and CEO of SunAmerica Financial Group, in addition to the Broads and Heyler.
“Today is about far more than a museum – it is a pivotal moment in the history of our City,” said Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. “I would like to thank Eli Broad for his countless contributions to our City’s economic and cultural vitality. The Broad Art Foundation will further boost downtown Los Angeles’s standing as a vibrant cultural and civic center. And with the Regional Connector that will link light rail lines from around Southern California, The Broad and Los Angeles’s entire wealth of cultural offerings will be accessible to all Angelenos and millions of visitors from around the country.”
The inaugural exhibition when the museum opens in two years will feature 200 of the most iconic works from the Broad Collections, including many recent additions to the collection and works never seen before in Los Angeles.
The artists who will be represented include Doug Aitken, El Anatsui, John Baldessari, Jean Michel Basquiat, Mark Bradford, Joseph Beuys, Chuck Close, Marlene Dumas, Sam Francis, Ellen Gallagher, Mark Grotjahn, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, Cady Noland, Lari Pittman, Neo Rauch, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Robert Therrien, Cy Twombly, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool, among many others.
For three years after the inaugural exhibition, The Broad will feature rotating exhibitions every four months, focusing on artists represented in distinctive depth in the collection, such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol and Christopher Wool. In addition to building and endowing the museum, the Broads are also advancing the funds to build a parking garage for the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA).
The CRA will purchase the parking garage and operate it upon its completion. The total cost to construct the museum and parking garage will exceed $130 million. The Broads have also paid $7.7 million to the CRA, which has earmarked the funds for affordable housing as part of the Grand Avenue project.
Construction of the three-story parking garage is planned to begin within the next 60 to 90 days. The museum construction is anticipated to begin in late summer and be completed in two years. The Santa Monica offices of Gensler will serve as the executive architect. Among their notable and acclaimed works, Diller Scofidio + Renfro has designed the renovation and expansion of Lincoln Center in New York City, the new Institute of Contemporary Art on Boston Harbor, and the innovative High Line park in lower Manhattan.
Projects in progress include the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive, the Museum of Image & Sound in Rio de Janeiro, and an inflatable event space at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The Creative Arts Center at Brown University will open next month.
In 1999-2004, the MacArthur Foundation presented Diller and Ricardo Scofidio with the “genius” award for their interdisciplinary practice and commitment to integrating architecture with issues of contemporary culture. They were recently named International Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and both were inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For their contribution to art and design, Diller and Scofidio were named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2009. Other prestigious awards and honors received by Diller Scofidio + Renfro include the National Design Award from the Smithsonian, the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters, the AIA President’s Award, the AIA Medal of Honor and numerous AIA Honor Awards for projects including Alice Tully Hall, the ICA and the High Line.
The Broads created The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a pioneering lending library for contemporary artworks. Dedicated to increasing access to contemporary art for audiences worldwide, the foundation has made nearly 8,000 loans to 485 museums and galleries around the world.
In addition to The Broad Art Foundation’s works, the loan program also makes available art from The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, for a total of more than 2,000 works by nearly 200 artists assembled over four decades of collecting. Together, the Broad Collections are among the most prominent and important collections of postwar and contemporary art in the world.
Among the artists represented in-depth in the Broad Collections are Joseph Beuys, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, Leon Golub, Andreas Gursky, Damien Hirst, Glenn Ligon, Sharon Lockhart, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Ed Ruscha, Philip Taaffe, Robert Therrien, Andy Warhol, Terry Winters, Christopher Wool, Richard Artschwager, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
The Broad Collections include the largest grouping of Cindy Sherman works in the world, one of the largest of Jeff Koons, the largest collection of Roy Lichtenstein’s works outside the Lichtenstein Foundation, the only near-complete grouping of the 570-plus “multiples of Joseph Beuys in the Western U.S., and one of the most significant groupings of Christopher Wool paintings.
The Broads have demonstrated longstanding support of the arts, particularly in Los Angeles. Eli Broad was the founding chairman and is a life trustee of MOCA, to which the Broads gave a $30 million challenge grant in December 2008 to rebuild the museum’s endowment and to provide exhibition support.
He is currently a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where the Broads gave a $60 million gift to build the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which opened in February 2008, and to fund an art acquisitions budget. The Broad Foundation made a major contribution to UCLA for The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. They gave $28 million to Michigan State University, Eli Broad’s alma mater, for the construction of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU, designed by Zaha Hadid and scheduled to open in 2012.
The Broad Foundations were established by entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation. The Broad Foundations’ Internet address is www.broadfoundation.org.
The Broad Art Foundation Museum Los Angeles images / information from Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Architects
Location: The Broad Art Foundation, 3355 Barnard Way, Santa Monica, CA 90405
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