The Broad's 'Has the myth been shattered': Six Decades of Memory and Media, Free in Downtown LA
By Giovanna Salas
This article is part of Free in Los Angeles, Heart of Hollywood Magazine's series on the museums across the region that open their doors at no charge.
This fall, The Broad turns to its own collection to ask an unsettling question. Has the myth been shattered, opening Saturday, November 21, 2026, brings together six decades of work by artists who use the media itself as material, from newspaper front pages to pamphlets, archival photographs and signage. More than a dozen of the works are on view at the museum for the first time, among them new acquisitions by Guadalupe Rosales, Hank Willis Thomas and Mickalene Thomas. Like the museum's general admission, the exhibition is free.
A Headline Held to a Mirror
The exhibition takes its title from Rosales's 2024 work of the same name, which opens the show. Rosales encases a Los Angeles Times front page published in the immediate aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising in a frame of LED lights and two-way mirror, where the headlines "Seeing Ourselves" and "Has the Myth Been Shattered?" glow beneath shifting color. In The Broad's words, the piece transforms "a historical record into a site of reflection." The question the newspaper asked more than three decades ago is still unresolved, and, as the museum puts it, "Rosales literally holds a mirror to it."
Six Decades of Media as Material
According to The Broad, many of the works on view were made in the 1980s and 1990s, "with artists often responding to the print media materials of their moment and to the stories those images told about race, history, and belonging." Others pair historical and contemporary materials to speak to struggles that continue today. Placed in proximity, the museum notes, the works "illuminate how the beliefs and stories a society lives by are constructed, inherited, and contested over time."
Hank Willis Thomas's Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot (2018) revisits a 13-page pamphlet distributed in 1968 to Black residents of Wilmington, Delaware, while the National Guard occupied the city for nine months. Thomas prints it on retroreflective vinyl, so the pamphlet's advice on first aid and police encounters gives way to photographs of the occupation only when a camera flash strikes the surface.
Mickalene Thomas's The Charnel House (Resist #5) (2021) answers Picasso's unfinished wartime painting The Charnel House (1944–45) with a canvas crowded with archival images and protest signage from the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter movements, worked in rhinestones, acrylic and oil. The museum describes it as a work that "transforms grief into a call for action."
On View for the First Time
Leon Golub's seven acrylic portraits of Nelson Rockefeller, painted in 1976, are on view at The Broad for the first time. Golub worked from source images of the former vice president dating from the 1940s to the early 1970s; the museum describes the series as using his public persona "to interrogate the dynamics of power and its abuses." Mark Tansey's Matrix (1993), painted in a single color, shows a vast conveyor belt of printed matter tended by one lone worker. As The Broad puts it, the painting is "a pointed reminder that media is a human process, and that individuals have always held the power to question, reshape, and reimagine myths."
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In Their Words
"The Broad collection has always supported artists who engage provocatively with the deepest and most highly charged subjects of their moment," said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. "Taking its title and perspective from a work by artist Guadalupe Rosales, a recent addition to the collection, this exhibition spans decades of collection artists asking questions about injustices that persist in American life and offers a glimpse of how the collection is evolving."
"My hope is that this presentation not only contends with issues of our political and media landscape but also illuminates how much power is embedded in collective action and socially engaged art making," said Jen Vanegas Rocha, Assistant Curator of The Broad and curator of the exhibition. "These artists are not simply reflecting the world as it is. They're architects of better futures, carving out space for the public to consider the possibilities within and against the systems they examine."
The Artists
The exhibition features Richard Artschwager, Sue Coe, Leon Golub, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Goshka Macuga, Neo Rauch, Guadalupe Rosales, Thomas Ruff, Ray Smith, Mark Tansey, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz and more. It is curated by Jen Vanegas Rocha with Curatorial Assistant Nadia Estrada, supported in part by East West Bank, Leading Partner of The Broad since 2017, and accompanied by a full season of public programming.
The Broad, Always Free
Founded on Grand Avenue in 2015 by the philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, the museum is home to one of the world's leading collections of postwar and contemporary art, with more than 2,000 works by nearly 200 artists. Its building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, in collaboration with Gensler, follows a veil-and-vault concept: a honeycomb outer skin filters daylight into the galleries while wrapping the vault where the collection is stored. An expansion of the museum is set to open in 2028, ahead of the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
Before or after the exhibition, visitors can book Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013). Entry is free but requires its own advance timed ticket; tickets are released monthly, and each visit lasts up to one minute.
Plan Your Visit
Exhibition: Has the myth been shattered runs November 21, 2026 through April 4, 2027. Tickets are included with free general admission and will be available at thebroad.org.
Admission: General admission is always free. Booking a timed ticket in advance is recommended, and walk-up entry is available daily. Some exhibitions and events carry a separate charge.
Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Address: 221 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
Parking: Enter the garage from 2nd Street. $19 for three hours with validation, $29 daily maximum, and a $19 flat rate after 5 p.m. on weeknights and all day on weekends.
Transit: Metro A and E lines to Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill station.
Website: https://www.thebroad.org
Exhibition details are drawn from The Broad's press release of August 20, 2026. Visitor information was checked against the museum's official website in September 2026. Hours, admission policies and exhibition dates are set by the museum and may change, so please confirm on the official website before you go.
Sources
The Broad: https://www.thebroad.org
The Broad, Has the myth been shattered: https://www.thebroad.org/art/collection-exhibitions/has-myth-been-shattered
Time Out Los Angeles, August 2026: https://www.timeout.com/los-angeles/news/the-broads-next-free-exhibition-confronts-mass-media-and-memory-082026
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