A Soaring Arts Scene in Los Angeles Confronts a Changing Landscape
Its cultural institutions, buffeted by the pandemic, will have to recover without the help of Eli Broad, the transformational benefactor who died last month.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a construction site these days, but it is hardly the only cultural organization in transition as the region tries to recover from the pandemic.Credit.Alex Welsh for The New York Times
May 12, 2021
LOS ANGELES The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is an open construction pit these days, surrounded by 12-foot-high wooden fences, with cranes rising across now open skies. Most of its midcentury modernist complex on Wilshire Boulevard was quietly demolished during the Covid shutdown to make way for a wavy $650 million light-filled building spanning the boulevard and designed by the architect Peter Zumthor.
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Emperor Napoleon III directed his prefect of the department of Seine, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to remake Paris. Between 1853 and 1870, the emperor’s bureaucrat drove iconic boulevards through warrens of medieval lanes and byways. Paris was made into our image of it: Belle Époque nostalgia.
Robert Moses, equally imperiously between 1924 and 1966, punched multilane highways through New York’s Black and brown neighborhoods and into the suburban countryside. Moses helped to cement an image of midcentury New York as the capital of American business and finance, deadening (for urban critic Jane Jacobs) much of what made the city livable.
Eli Broad, who died April 30 at 87, sought to remake the image of Los Angeles with the single-mindedness of a Haussmann or a Moses, commissioning or otherwise conjuring a series of grand buildings, beginning with the Museum of Contemporary Art at the apex of Bunker Hill. Walt Disney Concert Hall, frisky and buoyant and entirely in the spiri
The Learning Curve: Eli Broad’s Complicated Ed Reform Legacy
Boosters of traditional public education have long sought to paint billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad as a caricature giddily selling off the public trust to line his own pockets. But the true legacy of Broad and most so-called “reformers” is much more complicated.
Eli Broad, pictured in 2014 / Image via Shutterstock
The meaning of Eli Broad, billionaire education philanthropist, crystallized on the left many years ago: Broad is “a direct affront to democracy. Who elected Eli Broad to decide what the shape of the [Los Angeles Unified School District] should be? Who gave him the power to redirect public funds to private entrepreneurs?” wrote education historian Diane Ravitch on her blog in 2015.
Eli Broadâs medical research legacy will âtouch almost the whole worldâ
By Bryan Marquard and Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff,Updated May 7, 2021, 7:34 a.m.
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Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe Broad, in 2015.Chris Pizzello/Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Among scientists around the world, Eli Broadâs name will forever be tied to the role the institute he founded played in helping the region emerge from the global pandemic, and the foundation it provided for researchers who are seeking to identify and contain variants of the COVID-19 virus.
But Broad, who died April 30, also will be remembered by families, such as the Chakrabartis in Cambridge, for what the Broad Institute of MIT and Cambridge has done on an individual level, bringing the intellectual clout of a major research institute to bear on a rare illness.
Sonal Shah Tapped to Lead the Asian American Foundation
TAAF
Sonal Shah was President Obama’s first director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
The Asian American Foundation
Sonal Shah, a professor and founding executive director of the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University, has been named president of this new foundation. Shah was President Obama’s first director of the White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.
The foundation was created with an initial $125 million in donations from its board of directors, and it intends to raise additional money to make grants to Asian American and Pacific Islander organizations and causes over the next five years.