LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Broad is presenting Since Unveiling: Selected Acquisitions of a Decade, a free exhibition in the first-floor galleries running from November 20, 2021 to April 3, 2022. This exhibition highlights a selection of nearly 60 works acquired in the ten years since Eli and Edythe Broad publicly announced their plans for the opening of the museum, the Diller Scofidio + Renfro building on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. With its unique honeycomb veil design, The Broad was built to house the collection of postwar and contemporary art that the Broads cultivated for over five decades, and the museum has offered free general admission since its opening in 2015. The exhibition celebrates the museums dedication to collecting artists work in depth, featuring artworks that have entered the Broad collection in the last decade with some as recently as this year. Since Unveiling is made possible in part by generous support from Leading Partner East West Bank.
As a collector and tireless philanthropist, Eli Broad spent decades bringing contemporary art to public spaces, said Founding Director Joanne Heyler. Since Unveiling looks back at key acquisitions of the past decade as the museum took shape, built to share the collection with the public in perpetuity. The immersive multi screen installation The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson returns to our galleries for the occasion, and new acquisitions by artists Catherine Opie and Shirin Neshat are featured, as well as select acquisitions that expand the collections representation of Black artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Nathaniel Mary Quinn. Eli and Edye Broads sustained commitmentto collecting in depth, to focusing on artists confronting the issues of our times, and to relevanceis emphasized in this exhibition and will guide us going forward, as the collection continues to grow.
The fifty-three works on view by twenty-seven artists represent varying facets of contemporary art, from explorations of abstraction and figuration to examinations of place, identity, and narrative. Many works critique, re-contextualize, and interpret our global present, speaking to political struggle, American history, power, and the concept of home, amongst other themes. Nearly half of the artworks exhibited are on view for the first time at the museum, while almost seventy percent have entered the collection since the museum opened in September 2015.
Featured artists include John Baldessari, Glenn Ligon, and Kara Walker, whom The Broad has collected over decades, as well as artists added to the collection this past decade, including Tauba Auerbach, Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Charline von Heyl. The exhibition features a selection of both monographic and thematic galleries, including a dedicated presentation of works by Cindy Sherman spanning the artists career; the nine-channel HD video projection of Ragnar Kjartanssons The Visitors; a gallery with works by Gregory Crewdson, Shirin Neshat, and Nathaniel Mary Quinn that use portraiture to explore loss and longing; explorations of political power and commerce with works by Mark Bradford and Andreas Gursky; and works by Julie Mehretu and Robert Longo that take on both global struggle and protest.