Why The Broad Collection matters.
The Broad Collection is an expansive contemporary-art holding where Bunker Hill's cultural character meets postwar experimentation, concentrated artist holdings and decades of collecting built around the art of its own time.
Set along South Grand Avenue near West 2nd Street and just steps from California Plaza, the collection occupies galleries high above Bunker Hill within a cultural corridor where museums, performance venues and civic architecture cluster across the steep western edge of Downtown. Large paintings, sculpture, photography and room-scale installations unfold across broad gallery sequences, with substantial wall spans and open floors allowing radically different scales of art to coexist. Moving between galleries shifts the encounter from concentrated single-artist groupings into cross-generational arrangements, allowing recurring artists to reappear through different periods and bodies of work as the collection reveals its unusual depth. Monumental sculpture and mirrored environments interrupt the conventional succession of wall-hung art, changing movement, sightlines and bodily orientation as individual works claim entire rooms or substantial sections of gallery floor. The result is a collection whose scale is most powerful through sustained concentrations, allowing decades of work by major postwar and contemporary artists to develop across galleries as interconnected bodies.
What defines The Broad Collection.
The Broad Collection is best known for more than 2,000 works by 200 artists assembled by Eli and Edythe Broad across more than five decades, with particularly deep holdings in postwar and contemporary art. Edythe Broad initiated the couple's collecting after they moved to Los Angeles, visiting the city's galleries independently and purchasing works on paper before Eli joined her pursuit. A Vincent van Gogh drawing acquired in 1972 became an important early purchase, yet the Broads soon concluded that their strongest collection would emerge through sustained engagement with artists working during their own era. Their 1978 acquisition of Jasper Johns's 1975 Untitled marked an important commitment to contemporary painting, and the collection subsequently developed extensive Johns holdings spanning prints, paintings and sculpture. Cindy Sherman entered their orbit during the East Village period in 1982, when they acquired a group from her Untitled Film Stills through Metro Pictures and began building what became one of the collection's major single-artist concentrations. Jean-Michel Basquiat joined the collection during his lifetime, and the holdings eventually grew to 13 works capable of supporting dedicated presentations across different stages of his brief career. Jeff Koons became another sustained focus, with works extending from Three Ball 50/50 Tank and Rabbit through the porcelain Michael Jackson and Bubbles, the mirror-polished stainless-steel Tulips and later paintings. Major concentrations also formed around Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Cy Twombly, Mark Bradford, Takashi Murakami, Kerry James Marshall and Julie Mehretu. That strategy gives the collection its defining institutional strength: recurring commitment to individual artists across substantial portions of their careers, allowing changing ideas, techniques and formal ambitions to become visible through multiple works.
A separate institutional strategy transformed those acquisitions from private holdings into a collection designed for extensive public circulation. Eli and Edythe Broad created The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a lending library for contemporary art, responding to the difficulty museums faced in acquiring expensive works with limited acquisition budgets. The foundation built its holdings with lending embedded in its purpose, allowing museums to request individual works or small groups for one-person and thematic exhibitions without requiring the Broads to relinquish ownership. More than 9,000 loans have since placed works from the foundation in museums around the world, giving the collection an international exhibition history decades before its permanent Los Angeles home opened. The Grand Avenue museum consolidated that mission in 2015 by housing the foundation and collection together, placing stored works within a central vault connected directly to the exhibition floors and lending operation. Acquisition continued after the museum opened, broadening the holdings through artists including Tauba Auerbach, Catherine Opie, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Cauleen Smith, Lauren Halsey and Patrick Martinez as the institution extended beyond the generation around which the collection first developed. A major expansion now carries that access model into another phase: Diller Scofidio + Renfro's building scheduled to open in 2028 will increase gallery space by 70 percent and create second-floor areas where the public moves among racks containing collection paintings. The project turns the conventional boundary between storage and exhibition into another form of access, extending a principle established by the 1984 lending foundation into the physical organization of the museum itself.
How The Broad Collection fits.
The Broad Collection works as the anchor for a Downtown sequence tracing how hillside transportation, public commerce and civic learning connected Bunker Hill with the metropolitan center developing below it.
Begin at Angels Flight, the incline railway Colonel James Ward Eddy began constructing on August 2, 1901 beside the newly opened Third Street Tunnel before passenger service started that December 31 between Hill and Olive streets. More than 2,000 people rode on opening day, and a 1905 reconstruction placed the railway on a trestle above Clay Street to maintain a continuous grade; a station house and Hill Street arch followed during the next several years. The line became practical transportation for Bunker Hill residents and downtown workers before redevelopment forced its 1969 closure, sending the cars Sinai and Olivet into storage for 27 years. Reconstruction several hundred feet south enabled a 1996 return, preserving a surviving transportation system from the residential Bunker Hill erased around it. Continue to Grand Central Market, which opened in October 1917 as the Wonder Market across the ground floor of the Homer Laughlin Building and was promoted as the largest public market on the Pacific Coast. The building itself dated to 1898 and pioneered steel-reinforced, fireproof construction in the region, giving the market a technologically advanced shell within the commercial center of a city then ranked tenth nationally by population. Food merchants subsequently changed with Los Angeles itself, and the surviving market now brings legacy businesses including China Cafe, operating since 1959, together with newer vendors across 40 stalls. Conclude at Los Angeles Central Library, whose permanent home emerged after years of conflict over site selection and a 1921 bond measure that assigned $1.5 million toward construction. Bertram Goodhue developed the design around layered rectangular masses and a central tower before his death in April 1924 left longtime associate Carleton Winslow to supervise completion. The library opened on July 6, 1926 after 360,000 books and 4,000 catalog drawers were transferred from the Metropolitan Building, and Julian Garnsey's painted ceilings joined Lee Lawrie's sculpture and metalwork within the restrained architectural scheme. Dean Cornwell's California History murals entered the Rotunda in 1933, extending the building's artistic program after its public opening. The progression moves from Eddy's hillside railway through a public market created for a rapidly expanding metropolis into Goodhue's permanent home for the city library, tracing how transportation, commerce and civic knowledge connected Bunker Hill with the downtown below.
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