How to Visit: The Broad

The Broad is a contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. The museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, opened on Sept. 20, 2015 with free general admission. 

Free tickets are available for reservation at thebroad.org/visit. The museum is home to the nearly 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is one of the world’s leading collection of postwar and contemporary art. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building features two floors of gallery space to showcase The Broad’s comprehensive collection.

“Edye and I are delighted to welcome everyone to this museum, and we are excited to share the contemporary art in our collection with the public,” said Eli Broad. “We are pleased to offer free general admission so that affordability isn’t a criteria to see the art. We have been deeply moved by contemporary art and believe it inspires creativity and provokes and stimulates lively conversations. We hope visitors from Los Angeles and around the country and the world visit and are similarly enriched by this art.”

Founding Director Joanne Heyler added, “Opening a new public museum is a rare event and an important civic responsibility. We can’t wait to welcome the public through our doors and engage them with the collection, in a building that is itself a work of art.”

General admission to The Broad is free. Advance online reservations are encouraged, but not required. For visitors who want to ensure a specific date and time for their visit, and avoid wait times during busy periods, The Broad provides advance reservation of timed tickets online at no charge. Tickets have entry times beginning every half hour. Free tickets are available for reservation at thebroad.org/visits. Tickets are also available for same day or future visits onsite at the museum.

Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, a mirror-lined chamber housing a dazzling and seemingly endless LED light display, is featured in the inaugural installation. This experiential artwork on the museum’s first floor has limited capacity, accommodating one visitor at a time for approximately 45 seconds, and requires a separate free timed ticket, which general admission ticket holders are able to reserve after arrival at the museum.

The Broad’s free mobile web app, available at mobile.thebroad.org, features maps in French, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and Japanese, free self-guided audio tours, and information about the collection, artworks and artists on view.

Among the features of the mobile web app are free audio tours that can be taken as multi-stop tours or used just for individual stops in the 50,000 square feet of gallery space. The four initial tours available will be “Artists-on-Artists,” a tour featuring collection artists talking about pieces in the Broad collection by other artists including Barbara Kruger on Kara Walker’s African’t, John Baldessari on Sherrie Levine’s Fountain (Buddha), and Sterling Ruby on Christopher Wool’s Why?, among others; a collection highlights tour with commentary by founders Eli and Edythe Broad and founding director Joanne Heyler; an architecture tour featuring Elizabeth Diller, partner-in-charge at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm that designed The Broad; and “Looking with LeVar,” a family audio tour, narrated by award-winning actor, director and education advocate LeVar Burton.

The Broad is open to the public six days a week at the following times: Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The Broad is closed to the public on Mondays, as well as on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

The Broad is located at 221 S. Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, easily accessible by car or public transportation. The closest Metro station is the Civic Center/Grand Park Station on the Purple and Red Lines, located at 1st and Hill Streets (0.4 mile walk from the station, www.metro.net). The Broad is also accessible by many MTA bus routes, as well as by Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus.

Parking is available at The Broad in a three-level underground parking garage, entrance on 2nd Street between Hope Street and Grand Avenue. Parking for museum visitors with validation from The Broad is $17 for three hours on weekdays and $17 weeknights after 5 p.m. and all day weekends. Accessible parking spaces, electric vehicle parking spaces and bicycle parking are all available on level P1 of the garage. Additional parking is available at other adjacent lots around Grand Avenue.

For more information on The Broad and to sign up for updates, visit www.thebroad.org.