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Media Contact
Alex Capriotti, 213-232-6236, acapriotti@thebroad.org

The Broad to Welcome 200,000 Visitors by End of 2015

Advance tickets for December, January and February fully booked; Same-day tickets available onsite

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The Broad, photo by Jamie Pham

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 14, 2015—Since its Sept. 20 opening on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, The Broad has welcomed 177,264 visitors in its first 12 weeks and is on track to welcome more than 200,000 visitors by the end of 2015. Online advance reservations are booked into March, while the onsite queue can be up to two blocks long during times of peak demand, the museum announced today.

“The public reception to The Broad has been overwhelming and has exceeded our expectations,” said Founder Eli Broad. “Before we opened, we projected annual attendance of around 300,000 visitors, based on museums of similar size. We’re well on our way to exceeding that, and Edye and I could not be more delighted that the public has responded so positively to L.A.’s newest contemporary art museum.”

“In planning The Broad, our highest priorities were attracting a wide audience to contemporary art and creating a welcoming, engaging museum experience,” said Joanne Heyler, founding director of The Broad. “It’s exciting to see a growing diverse and engaged audience in our galleries. Our first 12 weeks affirms the strong public appetite in Los Angeles for meaningful and accessible contemporary cultural experiences.”

The Broad has also breathed new life into the urban experience along Grand Avenue. In addition to the steady visitors in its own galleries, people are flocking to new restaurants, including Otium, the restaurant adjacent to The Broad that opened last month and is helmed by Chef Timothy Hollingsworth. Since opening on Nov. 17, the restaurant has been at or near capacity every day. The Broad’s visitors, families, workers from the area and student groups visiting the cultural institutions along Grand Ave are also using the adjacent plaza as a compact urban oasis for relaxation and assembly.

The Broad offers free general admission to all, and free advance ticket reservations are available for visitors who want to guarantee a specific entry time. When advance tickets were first made available in the weeks before the museum opening, the overwhelming demand crashed the museum’s ticketing system. Over 135,000 tickets were reserved by opening day, just a couple of weeks after they had been made available.

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The Broad visitors; clockwise from top left: images 1, 2, and 4 by Ryan Miller; image 3 by Ben Gibbs

Advance free ticket reservations for the museum are available at www.thebroad.org with most availability in March. Advance tickets are not required. An onsite ticketing line is available at the museum every day except Mondays, when the museum is closed. Admission for the onsite ticketing line is first come, first served, based on availability. The wait time in the onsite ticketing line is 30 to 45 minutes on an average weekday, and 60 to 90 minutes on an average weekend. On holiday weekends, wait time in the onsite ticketing line can be up to two or three hours.

As part of The Broad’s commitment to its visitors, the museum’s widely-praised visitor services associates (VSAs) are uniquely trained to engage the public with the collection and museum’s architecture and assist with ticketing and admissions. The cross-trained workforce was hired over the summer to prepare for the opening of the museum through a highly specialized, custom-designed online training platform as well as in-person training. With backgrounds ranging from practicing artists to museum enthusiasts to interested members of the downtown community, The Broad’s VSAs reflect the museum’s audience and create an approachable, welcoming environment in the galleries.

Visitors have flocked to see The Broad’s inaugural installation, a sweeping, chronological journey through the Broad collection on both the first- and third-floor galleries of the museum that includes more than 250 works by some 60 artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, Julie Mehretu, Yayoi Kusama, Mark Bradford, Jeff Koons and Kara Walker. The inaugural installation will be on view through spring 2016. In mid-2016, the first-floor galleries will become the site of a series of temporary special exhibitions, which will be announced at a later date.

In addition to special exhibitions, The Broad’s programmatic offerings in 2016 will continue to engage regular museum attendees while also reaching out to new audiences. The Broad’s inaugural public programming, which was introduced this fall and already sold out several programs, brings fresh perspectives to the ideas and creative practices of the artists in the Broad collection through engagement with a wide array of leading voices in performance, film, music and children’s arts engagement. The Broad also will expand its reach by partnering with Los Angeles- based organizations like 826LA and Inner City Arts to bring schoolchildren to the museum for educational programs. These school visits will begin in January and will take place in the hours before the museum opens to the public (applications for grades 3–8 are now available at www.thebroad.org/schoolvisits).

About The Broad
The Broad is a new contemporary art museum founded by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The museum is designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler and offers free general admission. The museum is home to the 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 is the headquarters of The Broad Art Foundation’s worldwide lending library.

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