The Broad Museum celebrated its tenth year anniversary in 2025, with Robert Therrien: This is a Story, the largest museum exhibition of the late artist’s widely adored work to date. This presentation has offered a rare and tender homecoming for an artist who spent decades quietly shaping the soul of the Downtown Los Angeles art scene from his nearby studio.
For months visitors have been able to step directly into Therrien’s private imagination, witnessing a lifetime of brilliance gathered in one place for the first time—a fleeting, once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the full magnitude of a local legend.
Therrien’s meditations on scale and material are a deeply influential and well-known approach within the field of contemporary sculpture, significant to The Broad’s own identity as a museum that strives to make contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience.
The exhibition brings Therrien’s unique visual shorthand to life, moving from the massive presence of his oversized furniture and kitchenware to the quiet, detailed sketches of chapels, birds, and snowmen. These pieces represent a lifelong evolution of thought, where simple shapes undergo constant reinvention. With over 120 pieces covering fifty years of creativity, this showcase provides a rare look at how the artist toyed with human perception and memory—all located just a short distance from the Downtown Los Angeles studio where he lived and worked for three decades.
Visitors will encounter many works that have been kept out of the public eye until now, including final pieces completed shortly before his passing in 2019, providing a fresh and deeply personal perspective on his creative journey.
“Robert Therrien has longstanding ties to The Broad and was one of the very first L.A.-based artists to enter the Broad collection decades ago, in its first, formative years. His massive sculpture Under the Table has captivated visitors to our museum’s galleries since the day The Broad opened in 2015 on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director and President of The Broad. She added, “For our visitors who know and love Under the Table, this ambitious show will reveal a deeper and wide-lens look into the completely unique world Therrien created—a Los Angeles-based body of work that reshaped contemporary sculpture.”
Therrien (1947–2019) was born in Chicago and relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s to complete an MFA at the University of Southern California. Despite the prominence of conceptual and minimalist practices at the time, he developed his own adjacent artistic vernacular that saw the infinite potential of ordinary objects across basic forms and their three-dimensional counterparts. A single Therrien gesture can expand, contract, change materially, or seamlessly transform into other images entirely. This spirit of innovation is housed within a landmark building designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, where The Broad continues to grow its lead as a destination for postwar and contemporary art.
“Los Angeles has been and remains a historically important place to make sculpture and Robert Therrien is vital to that story,” said Ed Schad, Curator and Publications Manager at The Broad. “From his handmade and intimate responses to Minimalism in the 1970s, to his early involvement in what would become a golden age of L.A. fabrication, Therrien made important contributions to many of sculpture’s central conversations for over forty years.”
Visitors will be able to walk under and around large tables and chairs, approach enormous hanging beards, and navigate around large, stacked dishes designed to appear to be in motion. In addition, a special collaboration with the artist’s estate will expose visitors to partial reconstructions of Therrien’s studio environment. Therrien’s living and working space in Downtown L.A. remains pivotal to his understanding of space and size, echoing the museum’s own commitment to the local landscape, which includes an expansion set to open before the 2028 summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
In addition to being the largest solo museum presentation of his work to date, Robert Therrien: This is a Story places his legacy within the broader arc of contemporary sculpture in Los Angeles and beyond. Tickets to the exhibition will become available in Summer 2025 at thebroad.org, where the museum continues to offer free general admission and an active program of special exhibitions and innovative live events.
