Free timed tickets recommended. Infinity Mirrored Room requires a reservation.
Three words: Infinity Mirror Rooms. Downtown’s persistently popular contemporary art museum has two of Yayoi Kusama’s immersive, mirror-laden rooms (one that you merely peek into, another more immersive one that you step into). Elsewhere in the free museum, Eli and Edythe Broad’s collection of 2,000 post-war works includes artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons. Outside, the museum’s plaza features a lovely olive tree grove that sometimes hosts programming.
The museum has been an exciting addition to L.A.’s roster of institutions, though its encyclopedic survey of high-priced gallery prizes can feel a little safe at times (with some spectacle pieces mixed in). And though the gallery experience is pleasant, its vault and veil design appears much more opaque and heavier than it should. That said, there’s one design element we just love: the between-floors window that offers a peek into the collection storage.
The Broad opened in 2015 with an inaugural exhibition featuring Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Kruger, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Keith Haring and more rock stars of the 20th century—plus a whole lot of Koons. Standout installations included Ragnar Kjartansson’s beautiful nine-screen video piece The Visitors and an endless field of LEDs in Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (which you can still experience today).
We recently named the Broad the best free museum in the city, for its mix of accessibility, high-caliber art, and artistic and cultural programming. Today, the first-floor galleries are usually home to excellent rotating special exhibitions that do require a paid ticket, but even these are typically free on Thursday evenings. And soon there’ll be even more to love: A large-scale museum expansion is in the works, which will add three floors and 55,000 square feet of new gallery space above the parking lot—amounting to a whopping 70% increase of the museum’s footprint—by 2028.
