The Broad
Eli Broad's gift to LA: free contemporary art in a striking honeycomb building downtown.
The Broad is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opened in 2015 and funded by billionaire philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad. It was designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and holds the Broads' personal collection — around 2,000 works spanning the late 20th and early 21st centuries. General admission is free, which is remarkable for a collection of this caliber, and the building itself has become one of the most photographed structures in downtown LA, with its distinctive perforated concrete-and-fiberglass exterior known as 'the veil.'
Inside, the permanent collection is dominated by heavy-hitters: Jeff Koons's gleaming balloon sculptures, Cindy Sherman's unsettling self-portraits, Jean-Michel Basquiat's raw, urgent canvases, Roy Lichtenstein's pop art panels, and Barbara Kruger's text-based provocations. The undisputed crowd-pleaser is Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, an immersive installation that creates the sensation of standing inside an infinite cosmos of reflected light — it's become one of the most Instagrammed artworks in the world. Getting tickets for this specific experience requires advance booking. The museum's top floor is a soaring, skylit gallery space, while the ground floor handles ticketing and the gift shop.
The Broad sits right in the thick of the Grand Avenue cultural corridor, flanked by Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall across the street and MOCA a short walk away. Thursday evenings the museum stays open until 8pm, which is the least crowded time to visit. The free admission makes it an easy drop-in, but the Kusama room sells out fast — book that specifically well in advance if it's on your list.