Curator’s Voice: Lynn Zelevansky on Inaugurating the Broad Contemporary Art Museum

LOS ANGELES—The Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a steady newsmaker since it was conceived in June 2003, finally opened its doors to the public last month, in a landmark building designed by Renzo Piano. Spread over three stories, the museum comprises 60,000 square feet, almost every square inch of which is devoted to exhibition space (there are also bathrooms), as there are no offices, museum shop, or restaurant. Elevators and escalators are located on the building’s exterior in a gesture to Paris’s Pompidou Center, on whose design Piano also collaborated.

BCAM made headlines most recently when LACMA vice-chairman and super-collector Eli Broad and his wife Edythe announced that they would not gift their collections to the eponymous museum, but rather maintain them in their own foundation. Still, Broad has emphasized that he funded the museum’s $50 million cost and that LACMA will be the “favored institution” for loans from the foundation.

Indeed, BCAM’s inaugural exhibition is drawn mostly from the Broad collections — the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and the collection of the Broad Art Foundation, which together comprise about 2,000 works. The show, organized by Lynn Zelevansky, LACMA’s curator and department head of contemporary art, and Michael Govan, director of LACMA, will be on view in its entirety through September, at which point a gradual de-installation, set to take place in stages over several months, will begin.

A native New Yorker, Zelevansky worked at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for eight years before joining LACMA in 1995; she has been in her present position since 2004. Her recent shows include “Beyond Geometry:  Experiments in Form, 1940s–70s” (2004), “Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections” (2001–03), and “Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–68” (1998–99). She has also published widely and taught in universities on both the East and West Coasts.

ARTINFO spoke to Zelevansky about BCAM’s inaugural exhibition earlier this week.

Lynn, I understand the inaugural installation is more or less chronological.

It’s very roughly chronological. The installation was actually conceived as a tribute to the Broads. The Broads began their collection in the ’80s, then went back to the ’60s and started to fill it in with works by artists that they particularly loved from that time. The artists on the third floor are almost all ’60s artists [including Rauschenberg, Johns, Twombly, Lichtenstein, Kelly, Ruscha, Baldessari, and Warhol], with the exception of Jeff Koons, who’s on the top floor because it’s beautifully skylit, and his work was perfect for that space. And then downstairs on the second floor are almost all ’80s artists [including Longo, Goldstein, Basquiat, Salle, and Fischl], with the exception of Damien Hirst — and that’s because of the level of commitment that the Broads have made to his work.

If the installation is chronological, why does Serra get such a special status, with a whole floor to himself?

It was really Michael [Govan] who wanted to do that with the ground floor, to do a mini Serra show. We had just gotten one of them [Band (2006)] as a gift from the Broads, and we felt that we needed the other one [Sequence (2006), from the collection of Gap founder Donald Fisher] to balance up the other side. He also felt that they would be great works for the opening, in the sense that people could mill around them and experience them bodily. It’s an experience that you can have in a large space with a lot of other people. Not a lot of art lends itself to that.

I was surprised to see that, given how vast the Broad collections are, you still sometimes hung things from LACMA’s own collection, and, as with Sequence, even borrowed from elsewhere.

Yes, we did in some situations, though it’s still something like 80 percent Broad works. Where we thought we had a really great work that could augment the hanging we brought it in. We were just trying to see what worked best. For example, the Broads have a lot of Ed Ruscha works, but they don’t span his entire career in the way that we wanted them to, so we have additional works from our collection and a couple of other collections. We really wanted him to be very strong in the installation.

Similarly, the Broads have two absolutely great Rauschenbergs. One is the fabulous Untitled (Red Painting) (1954), which is a real transitional work between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. But we knew that we could get loans from Sonnabend, and it’s so rare to see these amazing iconic Rauschenberg works in Los Angeles that it seemed like a good idea.  

Doesn’t that compromise the show as a tribute to the Broads?

No. It really concentrates on their artists. In other words, we might have very strong holdings in another artist’s work at LACMA, but if they’re not represented in the Broads’ collections, we didn’t put them in. We have some really great early Frank Stellas, for example. We could do an amazing room of Frank Stellas, but we didn’t do it in this installation.

Their collection is a collection of individual artists in depth. Our collection is rarely that. We might have great single works, or two or three major works by an important artist, but they didn’t go into the show because it was conceived as a monographic installation, because that’s the way that the Broads collect.

And within an individual artist’s work, how did you make the selections?

Where we could we involved the artists in the installation. We sent Ellsworth Kelly the plan for the installation and he felt that we had to include a black and white painting which was the last painting that he did in Paris. We were thrilled that he was willing to lend it from his personal collection.

What about Cindy Sherman? There’s practically a full-scale retrospective of her work there.

There are about 50 works by Sherman. And it’s not everything by her that they own, by the way. They have more of Cindy Sherman’s work than anybody else, I think.

Did you consult her on the hang?

We did. She basically planned the layout for that gallery. I’m really pleased with it; I don’t think anyone else could have done it the way she did.

You mentioned earlier that you wanted to show Ed Ruscha to best advantage. Do you feel that LACMA has a mission to promote L.A. art?

I do. If you’re building a collection nowadays, you can’t cover the entire world. You have to figure out some kind of a focus. We have what is arguably the premier collection of L.A. art from the ’60s and ’70s, and we keep building on that. We want it to be the destination collection for L.A. art. We also feel that we want to represent the artists in our community. Obviously we want to see them in a national and international context, but we want them to be a very strong suit in how we present contemporary art in the museum.