The broad contemporary art museum at LACMA by Renzo Piano
Los Angeles California, 2003 - 2008
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.
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From February 16, 2008, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA is
open. 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.
Completed in February 2008, Phase I of LACMA's ongoing Transformation began the
unification and expansion of the museum's campus. The project added 60,000
square feet of new gallery space via BCAM; a new central gathering space, the
BP Grand Entrance; the Dona S. and Dwight M. Kendall Concourse, which enables
visitors to easily traverse the galleries and piazzas across LACMA's campus;
and the Jeanne and Anthony Pritzker Family Foundation Parking Garage, which
occupies two levels underground with dedicated spaces for more than 500
self-parked cars or 700 valet-parked cars. Existing areas were reenvisioned,
such as the Ahmanson Grand Staircase, installed in The David Bohnett Foundation
Atrium, which leads from the concourse to the plaza level and, because of its
central location, links the eastern portion of the campus to BCAM and LACMA
West while also redirecting the flow of foot traffic through the building. Tony
Smith's Smoke, a massive aluminum sculpture, is installed at the foot of the
staircase.
The addition of the BCAM galleries advanced LACMA's strategy to integrate
contemporary art into its exhibitions and public programs and to explore the
interplay of the art of our time with that of the past. Further, the BCAM
gallery space has enabled LACMA to shift and reorganize several major areas of
its collections, including the 350-piece installation of modern works,
encompassing objects from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German
Expressionist Studies and the newly acquired Lazarof Collection. The
installation occupies 22,000 square feet of space in the dramatically
refurbished Ahmanson Building. In July 2008, the entire Latin American
collection was reinstalled, including the art of the ancient Americas
collection, which resides in innovative casework designed and built by Los
Angeles artist Jorge Pardo. In addition, LACMA's robust American collection,
which includes notable recent acquisitions of works by Thomas Eakins and George
Bellows, was reinstalled in 2007, integrating decorative arts, design, and
photography with painting and sculpture.
