The Broad Art Foundation is a lending resource of contemporary art drawn from the collections of two of the foremost philanthropists of our day, Eli and Edythe Broad. With a strong desire to advance public appreciation for contemporary art, the Broads established The Broad Art Foundation in 1984 as a way to keep these works in the public domain through an enterprising loan program that makes the art available for exhibition at accredited institutions throughout the world. The result is a lending library of contemporary art and an expansive collection that is regularly cited as one of the top in the world.
In its first two decades, the Foundation loaned nearly 8,000 works to 485 institutions with combined annual visitors of more than 100 million.
Public institutions face numerous challenges when presenting avant-garde work: increasing operating costs, shrinking government support, and powerful speculative buyers in the art market who may not commit to sharing their acquisitions in public exhibitions. The Broad Art Foundation keeps pace with the market – collecting with the agility and speed of a private collector – yet does so with a public-minded objective: creating a unique repository of contemporary art with the sole purpose of display and study by public institutions.
