the broad contemporary art museum at LACMA

Underscoring the Broads’ profound commitment to public museums and to the city of Los Angeles, Eli and Edythe Broad and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2003 announced the Broads’ $60 million donation to create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA. This unprecedented gift encompassed three philanthropic goals: to ensure LACMA’s crucial role in the presentation of modern and contemporary art in Los Angeles; to bring a great architect to LACMA to help redress its architectural and functional problems; and most importantly to catalyze and advance the growth of Los Angeles as a global capital of contemporary art. The Broads’ gift was their largest gift to a single arts institution and the largest donation ever made to LACMA.

The Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA openend in February 2008. Designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Renzo Piano, BCAM provides the LACMA campus with an extraordinary three-story, 72,000-square-foot gallery building dedicated to art from 1945 to the present.  BCAM also is the Phase 1 centerpiece of LACMA’s ambitious overall program of expansion and renovation. The building is one of the largest column-free art spaces in the United States, with loft-like galleries and a skylit top floor. The Broad Art Foundation works closely with LACMA to arrange rotating loans to BCAM from our collections, and the exhibitions also feature loans from other institutions and collectors, as well as from LACMA’s own growing contemporary collection. Against the diverse and deep backdrop of LACMA’s extraordinary encyclopedic holdings, BCAM provides museum visitors a unique opportunity to consider contemporary art in a wider context than at almost any other art institution.

Joseph Beuys: The Multiples

Joseph Beuys: The Multiples, the first west coast presentation of The Broad Art Foundation’s nearly 600 Beuys works will be on view from September 19, 2009 through June, 2010 on the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM).

The Foundation’s holding is the most important collection of Beuys multiples in the western United States and one of the three largest in the world. Beuys called his multiples his “vehicles for communication” with the public. Using an array of materials from grey felt, bottles, reels of film, fish bones, or postcards each multiple has both political and personal spiritual meaning for Beuys. Since through multiplicity, more people could appreciate the artist’s social and political concepts, Beuys considered the multiples essential to the activist capacity of his art, saying that “if you have all my multiples, then you have me entirely.”