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Artist David Salle and Writer Hilton Als to be Featured in The Broad’s Un-Private Collection Series This Month

David Salle, photo by Robert Wright; Hilton Als, photo by Dominique Nabokov

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 12, 2016—The Broad announced today that artist David Salle will be in conversation with writer Hilton Als on Thursday, Oct. 27 at 7 p.m. as the next program in the museum’s popular Un-Private Collection series. The pair will discuss Salle’s new book HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, among other topics.

The Broad launched The Un-Private Collection series in September 2013, before the museum opened, to present public conversations with cultural leaders and influential contemporary artists in the Broad collection. The Broad collection includes many key works by Salle, spanning more than three decades.

“It’s wonderful to be able to bring together two significant cultural voices to discuss David’s work and his new book HOW TO SEE,” said Ed Patuto, director of audience engagement at The Broad. “Salle holds a special place in the Broad collection and is just one of the many painters of his generation represented in depth. The Broads have been collecting his dramatic and mysterious paintings since 1981. Hilton Als is a leading cultural critic in New York and nationally. His distinctive writing in his two-plus decades at The New Yorker, and previously, at The Village Voice, have covered a phenomenal range of topics from art exhibitions to Beyonce. We look forward to an irreverent and intimate conversation between friends about David’s essays on artists’ work–many of whom are represented in the Broad collection.”

The talk will be held at The Oculus Hall at The Broad. Tickets are $15 and will be available on Thursday, Oct. 13 at noon at www.thebroad.org/programs. Tickets include same-night access to the museum.

About David Salle

Painter David Salle has taken the device of pastiche and made it both the form and the content of his work. His canvases are populated with dramatic images lifted from sources as various as Salle’s own black-and-white photographs, eighteenth- through twentieth-century French and American painting, 1950s print advertising and how-to-draw manuals. The juxtaposition of these images gives his paintings a mystery and charge that intrigued the art world in the 1980s and made him a leading artist of what is commonly known as the return to painting or post-modernism. Salle’s paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Los Angeles County Art Museum, Tate Modern, the National Galerie Berlin and many others. The Broad collection includes 14 paintings by Salle.

About Hilton Als

Hilton Als became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1996, a theater critic in 2002 and chief theater critic in 2013. His first book, The Women, a meditation on gender, race and personal identity, was published in 1996. His most recent book, White Girls, discusses various narratives around race and gender and was nominated for a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2014 he wrote the catalogue essay for Robert Gober: The Heart is Not a Metaphor at the Museum of Modern Art. He has also written articles for The Nation, The Believer and The New York Review of Books, and collaborated on film scripts for Swoon and Looking for Langston. Als has taught at Wesleyan, Wellesley, Smith and the Yale School of Drama. He lives in New York City.

About Davis Salle’s HOW TO SEE

David Salle’s new book HOW TO SEE: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art (W. W. Norton & Company) is an expansive collection of essays about how art works that looks at art through the eyes of the artist. Salle is a deeply intelligent and charmingly irreverent guide, and HOW TO SEE explores the mechanics and structure of a successful artwork without pretension or jargon, “in the language that artists use when they talk among themselves.”

Each essay is loosely centered on a single artist or a small group, many of whom are among Salle’s contemporaries, friends and one-time classmates. Peppered with anecdotes and stories accumulated throughout a lifetime in the art world, HOW TO SEE also provides glimpses of the personalities and quirks behind the most revered names in contemporary art including Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Roy Lichtenstein, Jeff Koons, John Baldessari, Urs Fischer, Jack Goldstein and Thomas Houseago, all of whom have been shown at The Broad.

Exploring art “from the inside out,” the essays touch on topics such as the aesthetics of cool, the relationship between art and celebrity and the evolution of an artist’s style over a lifetime——always while paying close attention to and unpacking the workings of the art itself. Salle writes with such a deeply felt joy, generosity and enthusiasm for his craft and his community that his essays breathe new life into the act of art-viewing.

About The Broad

The Broad is a new contemporary art museum built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum, which is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler, opened Sept. 20, 2015 with free general admission. The museum is home to the nearly 2,000 works of art in the Broad collection, which is among the most prominent holdings of postwar and contemporary art worldwide. With its innovative “veil-and-vault” concept, the 120,000-square-foot, $140-million building features two floors of gallery space to showcase The Broad’s comprehensive collection and serves as the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library.

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