Edythe and Eli Broad
The Broad Foundations
Eli Broad is a renowned business leader who built two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up over a five-decade career in business. He is the founder of both SunAmerica Inc. and KB Home (formerly Kaufman and Broad Home Corporation). Today Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe, are devoted to philanthropy as founders of the Broad Foundations, which they established to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science, and the arts. The Broad Foundations, which include the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and the Broad Art Foundation, have assets of $2.5 billion.
Over the past four decades the Broads have built two of the most prominent collections of postwar and contemporary art worldwide: the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection and the collection of the Broad Art Foundation. The two collections together include approximately 1,800 works by more than 150 artists. Since 1984 the Broad Art Foundation has operated an active "lending library" of its extensive collection. Dedicated to increasing access to contemporary art for audiences worldwide, the Broad Art Foundation has provided more than 400 museums and university galleries worldwide with more than 3,000 loans of artwork.
Mr. Broad has held numerous leadership roles on boards around the country. He was the founding chairman and is a life trustee of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, is a life trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the California Institute of Technology, and he is currently a trustee of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Broad is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1994 was named Chevalier in the National Order of the Legion of Honor by the Republic of France. In 2004, he became a Regent of the Smithsonian Institution by appointment of the U.S. Congress and the President. In 2007, Mr. Broad received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.
Tireless advocates of Los Angeles, the Broads have championed the city's cultural and architectural vitality. Committed to the belief that all great cities need a vibrant center, Mr. Broad was the visionary behind the development of Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, which will blend residential, retail, cultural, and recreational uses into a civic centerpiece to rival the main boulevards of the world's greatest cities. In 1996 Mr. Broad and then-mayor Richard Riordan spearheaded the fund-raising campaign to build the Frank Gehry–designed Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened to worldwide acclaim in October 2003. The Broads have provided the lead gift to the Los Angeles Opera to bring Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen to Los Angeles in 2008–10.
Strong believers in higher education, the Broads have further extended their philanthropy in the arts. The Broad Foundation made a major contribution to the School of the Arts and Architecture at UCLA for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, designed by Richard Meier. In 1991 the Broads endowed the Eli Broad College of Business and the Eli Broad Graduate School of Management at Michigan State University (MSU), where Mr. Broad graduated cum laude in 1954. In June 2007 the Broads announced a $26 million gift to create the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU.
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