“Anything I do, I spend a lot of time. I do it with passion and intensity. I want to be in charge.”
Image from Broad Museum site. (All other images mine.)
The Broad Museum opened up in September 2015 in downtown Los Angeles. Admission is free, but tickets are booked up months in advanced, especially for a weekend date. I jumped on reserving tickets before the museum opened. I have been lucky enough to go to The Broad twice, in November and in February, with two groups of friends.
I was particularly excited to see the Infinity Room. I had gone to a Kusama exhibition in New York two years ago, and although I got to see much of her incredible work, the line for the Infinity Room was 3 hours long. This November at the Broad, I was again unable to see the exhibit. I learned that the only way to see the room is to get tickets for the museum for 10 or 11 am and claim a spot in line when you arrive. I was successful in February when I did just that. Rob and I had to wait 4 hours to see it (our friends decided to skip), but we leisurely went through the museum, had a lovely brunch at The Otium next door, and were texted when we could enter. It ended up being a lovely day.
After Rob and I had spent hours in the museum and seen the Infinity Room, we went back to my favorite exhibit in the building, The Visitors by Ragnar Kjartansson. We sat in the room for about an hour. I had been feeling extremely stressed and upset that week, sitting in the corner in the dark, surrounded by soothing music and beautiful images was the best therapy I could have had. I never wanted to leave.
The Broad Museum gives a short description on their website: "The Visitors features nine musicians in various rooms at Rokeby farm in upstate New York, a decaying nineteenth-century mansion known for its romantic setting and gloomy charm. Each performer uses different instruments and plays the lyrics in their own deeply felt ways in one long, extremely impressive sixty-four-minute take. The screens in the gallery project all at once, resulting in a collective experience for the viewer. Together, the videos create what critic Hilarie M. Sheets calls an “entirely absorbing ensemble piece that was alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swelled in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir.”
Although it doesn't do it justice, I posted a video below of The Visitors at a previous gallery. Skip to 3:40 for one of my favorite songs in the piece which also happens to be last song in the 64 minutes.
The Broad is terrific. If you live in LA or know when you will be making a trip here, reserve tickets. There's no need to wait in line to see the museum.
