The Broad is a contemporary art museum on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum is named for philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, who financed the $140 million building that houses the Broad art collections.
In the entrance hall is an installation by Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. This was in a separate room which you entered and stood on a platform in darkness, and then ….
It is a fantastic gallery and has a standing exhibition of works by Roy Lichtenstein, so this was our next port of call.
When Eli and Edythe Broad acquired Rauschenberg’s Untitled in 1983, they traded Vincent van Gogh’s drawing Cabanes à Saintes-Maries, 1888, which they had cherished for a long time. For the Broads, Untitled represented a turning point in their lives as collectors, a symbol of their increasing commitment to the works of contemporary artists.
Jean Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents in 1960, and left home as a teenager to live in Lower Manhattan. In the late 1970s, he and fellow artist Al Diaz became known for their graffiti, a series of cryptic statements seen around Manhattan.
Many of Basquiat’s works have been likened to the improvisational and expansive compositions of jazz. Often themes accumulate through multiple references on a surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams.
Basquiat’s work celebrates histories of Black art, music, and poetry, as well as religious and everyday traditions of Black life. At the same time, his paintings and drawings offer these references against the American and global backdrop of the white supremacist legacy of slavery and colonialism.
In his work, Basquiat integrated critique of an art world that both celebrated and tokenized him. He was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception, whether it took the form of positive or negative stereotypes. Basquiat saw his own status in this small circle of collectors, dealers, and writers as connected to an American history rife with exclusion, invisibility, and pater-nalism, and he often used his work to directly call out these injustices and hypocrisies.
Jeff Koons created the ‘Puppy’ outside the Gulbenkian in Bilbao and here he is in Los Angeles with Balloon Dog
There were many other artists but we’re saving them for the next time!