Transparency is all the rage these days, a fact that LA’s nascent Broad Museum is fully embracing. The museum, right next to DTLA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall and steps from MOCA, has been designed in a way that maximizes the visibility of its vault to museum visitors.
In most museums around the world, the vault remains a black box to the casual art lover; we get to see only those things that are hauled in and nailed to the walls. In fact, many museums don’t even have one vault, but instead several warehouses spread around their hometown. The Broad’s idea is to break the fourth wall, allowing museum-goers a behind-the-scenes look at all that goes into the logistics of curation and art handling.
Visitors standing on two of the stairwell landings can peer out over the storeroom, where row after row of rolling steel racks hold many of the museum’s artworks and workers mill about, hanging up, pulling down, packing, and unpacking. Several racks stand right up against windows, making for an impromptu gallery. Film pieces are kept in a refrigerated room while sculptures and other 3D works remain in rooms with dedicated rolling shelves and cabinets.
The museum will feature over 2,000 works of art from renowned artists Cindy Sherman, Ed Ruscha, Takashi Murakami, Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl, and Andreas Gursky (just to name a few).
The Broad Museum will be open to the public September 20th…though you can watch a time-lapse video of the building’s construction dating back to 2011.
