The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is the largest art museum in the Western United States with more than 120,000 works in its permanent collection and more than 1 million visitors annually. Its collection is encyclopedic, its programs are exemplary, and its leadership is solid, but LACMA’s mid-Wilshire campus is a hot mess.
Eli Broad has been a primary benefactor of the LA art world for decades. He was the founding chairman of MOCA in 1979 and is a lifetime trustee. In 2008, The Broad Foundation gave MOCA a $30 million bailout after its endowment had been depleted. Broad is also a lifetime trustee at LACMA, where The Broad Foundation gave $60 million for the Renzo Piano-designed Broad Contemporary Art Museum building. In total, the Broads have given over $800 million to LA’s art institutions.
Simultaneously, the Broads and The Broad Art Foundation have developed a combined art collection of nearly 2,000 important modern and contemporary works. So, Eli Broad is building a new museum.