Eli Broad

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Eli Broad (born June 6, 1933) is an American philanthropist who presently resides in Los Angeles, California. His last name is pronounced as rhyming with road.

Broad is well known for his philanthropy and extensive art collection. A strong advocate of the city, he is actively involved in the on-going projects to revitalize downtown Los Angeles, and is an ardent supporter of efforts to raise the city's cultural profile.

Broad, a native of Detroit, Michigan, was the youngest person in the history of Michigan to become a Certified Public Accountant (CPA). He made his initial fortune in real estate at his company Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home). He is also a founder of the financial giant SunAmerica. He was CEO of SunAmerica, now a subsidiary of the American International Group, until the year 2000.

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[edit] Philanthropy

In 1991, Broad endowed the Eli Broad College of Business at his alma mater Michigan State University, from which he graduated cum laude in 1954.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was founded with a $100 million donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Broad and his wife, Edythe, in 2003. In 2005, the couple donated another $100 million to Harvard. On 4 September 2008 the Broads gave another $400 million to the Broad Institute. The endowment will be managed by Harvard's investment unit.[1]

Eli Broad donated $23.2 million towards the Broad Art Center at UCLA, and another $20 million to UCLA Stem Cell Institute.[2]

Eli and Edythe Broad are the founders of The Broad Foundations,[3] with the mission of advancing 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 $2.1 billion. The Broad Foundations’ Internet address is www.broadfoundation.org.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation's education work is focused on dramatically improving urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition. The Broad Foundation has four national flagship initiatives:

The $2 million Broad Prize for Urban Education is the nation’s largest education award given annually to urban school districts that have made the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement.[4]

The Broad Superintendents Academy is a 10-month executive management program to train working CEOs and other top executives from business, non-profit, military, government and education backgrounds to lead urban school systems.[5]

The Broad Residency in Urban Education is a two-year management development program that trains recent graduate students, primarily with business and law degrees, who have several years of work experience and places them immediately into managerial positions in the central operations of urban school districts.[6]

The Broad Institute for School Boards is a national training and support program for urban school district governance teams of school board members and superintendents. The latest offering of The Broad Institute is Reform Governance in Action, a training program for reform-minded school board-superintendent teams to establish efficient and effective policies and processes that will improve board operations, strengthen management oversight and directly improve learning opportunities for students.

In May 2007, the Broad Foundation donated $ 10 million dollars to the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, a high-performing public charter management organization in Los Angeles.

The Eli and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC is the product of an innovative public-private partnership between voter-created CIRM, the Keck School of Medicine of USC and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which donated $30 million in 2006.[7]

On April 25th, 2007, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation joined forces with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledging a joint $60 million to create Strong American Schools, a nonprofit project responsible for running Ed in 08, an information and initiative campaign aimed at encouraging 2008 presidential contenders to include education in their campaign policies.[8]

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation gave $56 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the museum's renovation campaign to create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. Mr. Broad is a life trustee of LACMA.[9]

On June 1, 2007 Eli and Edythe Broad pledged $26 million to Michigan State University for construction of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum.[10]

He is also a member of the California Institute of Technology Board of Trustees and endowed the Broad Center for the Biological Sciences there.

Eli and Edythe Broad contributed $10 million for a programming endowment for a state-of-the-art music and performing arts center at Santa Monica College, The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage, and an adjacent black box performance space, The Edye.

[edit] Art Collection

Eli and Edythe Broad pioneered an innovative lending library for contemporary art. The Broad Art Foundation, which they established in 1984, has made more than 7,000 loans to more than 450 museums and university galleries worldwide. The Broads' have two collections -- a personal collection with nearly 500 works and The Broad Art Foundation's collection, which has approximately 1,500 works Modern and contemporary art. The collection was one of the most sought-after by museums in the U.S., until January 2008, when Broad and his wife decided that their personal collection would ultimately go to their foundation to make loans to museums rather than give any of the art away.[11]

Some of the best-known works are by contemporary artists including:[12]

  • John Baldessari's two text paintings from 1967-68.
  • Jasper Johns - flag paintings (1960 and 1967), mixed-media "Watchman" (1964), "hatch" (1975)
  • Jeff Koons - fluorescent-lighted vacuum cleaners (1981), floating basketballs and bronze lifeboat (both 1985), stainless-steel bunny rabbit (1986), "Bubbles," a life-size porcelain portrait of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee (1988), the first "Balloon Dog" (1994, in blue), and a "Cracked Egg" purchased for $3.5 million in 2006.[13] Broad owns more than 20 Koons pieces, and donated €640,000 ($900,000) to help sponsor a 2008 Koons retrospective at Versailles (with fellow Koons collector François Pinault).[14]
  • Roy Lichtenstein - three comic strip paintings (1962-65) and his 1969 abstraction of a mirror. In November 1994, Broad purchased "I...I'm Sorry" for $2.5 million USD at a Sotheby's auction, paid with his American Express credit card, and thereby earned 2.5 million frequent flyer miles.
  • Robert Rauschenberg - 1954 red abstraction.
  • Edward Ruscha's first word painting, "Boss" (1961) and his 1964 picture of Norm's La Cienega Boulevard restaurant on fire.
  • Cindy Sherman - twelve photographs from 1977-80 photographs.
  • David Smith - Cubi XXVIII, executed in 1965. Broad's October 2005 purchase at a Sotheby's auction set a contemporary art auction record of $23,816,000.[13] Broad claimed he had "been looking for a Cubi for more than a decade...I knew it would go way over the estimate and I was prepared, frankly, to pay more than what I bid." [15]
  • Andy Warhol's advertising image, "Where's your rupture?", two Marilyn Monroe images, a twenty-fold silkscreen of Jackie Kennedy, an Elvis, a dance diagram, a wanted poster, an electric chair and a Campbell's soup can -- clam chowder, Manhattan style (purchased for $11.8 million)[13] -- all from 1961 to 1967.

[edit] Wealth

With an estimated current net worth of around $5.2 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the 93-richest person in the world.[16]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/05/education/05gift.html?hp
  2. ^ http://www.arts.ucla.edu/BroadArtCenter.htm
  3. ^ http://www.broadfoundation.org
  4. ^ http://www.broadprize.org
  5. ^ http://www.broadacademy.org
  6. ^ http://www.broadresidency.org
  7. ^ [1]
  8. ^ Billionaires Start $60 Million Schools Effort
  9. ^ Boehm, Mike (March 6, 2007), "BP gives $25 million to LACMA: The BP donation will go toward a solar entrance that the British oil firm hopes will invoke energy innovation." ([dead link] – Scholar search), Los Angeles Times, http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-lacma6mar06,0,1254648.story?coll=cl-calendar 
  10. ^ MSU receives $26 million from Eli and Edythe Broad for new art museum
  11. ^ Wyatt, Edward (January 8, 2008), "An Art Donor Opts to Hold On to His Collection", New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/arts/design/08muse.html?scp=1&sq=broad+lacma 
  12. ^ Knight, Christopher (January 10, 2008), "Will LACMA's reputation suffer from Broad's change of heart?" ([dead link] – Scholar search), Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-critic11jan10,1,6451548.story?ctrack=4&cset=true 
  13. ^ a b c "Eli Broad Buys Koons' $3.5M "Cracked Egg"". ArtNews. October 16, 2006. http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/22743/art-news-eli-broad-buys-koons-35m-cracked-egg/. Retrieved 2008-11-14. 
  14. ^ Covington, Richard (November 2008). "Where Michael Jackson Meets Louis XIV: How the Jeff Koons exhibition at Versailles led to a national controversy in France".  ARTNews, Nov. 2008, p. 104: "One of the main sponsors helping to defray that cost was Pinault, who, officials say, contributed about €960,000 toward the exhibition's €1.9 million ($2.6 million) total cost. (Other private sponsors, including Los Angeles property developers Eli and Edythe Broad, who count more than 20 Koons pieces in their collection, contributed €640,000 [$900,000], and the state chipped in €300,000 [$400,000], according to Versailles officials.)"
  15. ^ Judd Tully (November 11, 2005), ArtInfo Exclusive: Eli Broad Talks about His $24M Purchase of Cubi XXVIII, ARTINFO, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/1551/artinfo-exclusive-eli-broad-talks-about-his-24m-purchase-of-cubi-xxviii/, retrieved 2008-05-19 
  16. ^ http://www.forbes.com/lists/2009/10/billionaires-2009-richest-people_Eli-Broad_599L.html

[edit] External links

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