It's already been a year since we snapped our first Infinity Mirrored Room selfie, took our first escalator ride up to the third-floor gallery and playfully explored the oversized furniture of Under the Table. The Broad opened in Downtown Los Angeles on September 20, 2015, and the sense of buzz, excitement and pride surrounding the museum still feels much as it did a year ago.
If you happen to be visiting the Broad today, you can celebrate the art museum's birthday with balloons, birthday hats and free cupcakes from Sprinkles. Meanwhile, at Otium, chef Tim Hollingsworth has created an Andy Warhol-inspired clam chowder and a cocktail concocted after Jeff Koons' Michael Jackson and Bubbles.
Though Grand Avenue hasn't changed much since the art museum's opening, the Broad has touted its inaugural year as an economic boon to the neighborhood. You may not always see much pedestrian activity on Grand, but you do inevitably see that ever-present standby line outside of the free museum.
Photograph: Michael Juliano
Those daily crowds outside have really delivered for the Broad, which brought in 820,000 visitors in its first year—nearly triple pre-opening projections. By comparison, those figures dwarf next-door neighbor MOCA but trail behind the much larger LACMA campus, which brings in more than a million guests annually, and the also always-free Getty, which sits just under two million. Outside of L.A., that's enough to rank the Broad among the top 80 art museums worldwide in terms of annual attendance and in the top 15 U.S. art museums.
The Broad has largely attracted a young, diverse and mostly local audience, with 60% of visitors coming from within L.A. County. And we now have the numbers to back up our assumption that the average attendee is just there for the selfies—more than 80 percent of the Broad's visitors said they had very little or modest knowledge of contemporary art. The Broad has certainly held up its end of the art bargain, though; its excellent Cindy Sherman exhibition runs through October 2 with a new fall show and a dedicated Infinity Mirror Room exhibition on the way.
Photograph: Michael Juliano
If you dare question how cool the Broad is, you'll have to answer to a lineup of cultural luminaries in this special birthday video, including Cate Blanchett, Miranda July (in what appears to be an OBGYN office), Levar Burton and Ava DuVernay as well as some of the museum's featured artists like Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha (lighting a birthday candle) and Glenn Ligon.
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