Antique

The guards at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles aren't just here to protect the art — they're also expected to engage and educate. They're called visitor services associates, and they've gone through hours and hours of training to become ambassadors for contemporary art.

It's hard to imagine a more magical way to begin a museum visit than to step inside The Infinity Mirrored Room at The Broad Museum. Artist Yayoi Kusama has covered the walls, floor and ceiling with mirrors. LED lights hang from the ceiling and are reflected everywhere you look. The lights sometimes move with the closing of the door, and create a wonderland of infinite color.



You can only spend about 45 seconds in Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away — but in that short time you'll find yourself transported.

The shimmering installation is absolutely transporting — but can only be viewed for 45 seconds. No more than two or three people at a time can enter this small space, and there's a long line of others outside, patiently waiting to get in. It's hard to be mad, though, because the guard who ushers you out is so knowledgeable and pleasant — and he's not an outlier.

At the 5-month-old Broad Museum, guards aren't just there to protect the beautiful and provocative art. They are there to engage with visitors — talking and teaching about the artworks.

Guard Sabrina Gizzo might easily be mistaken for a docent. She's talking with some visitors about Thomas Struth's huge color photograph of a crowd at a museum in Florence Italy. In the photo, tourists are dressed in summer clothes — shorts, T-shirts, caps, sneakers. Struth photographs the crowd facing us, looking up at something we can't see. As Los Angeles visitors to The Broad study Struth's photograph — a museum crowd looking at another museum crowd — one Broad visitor notices that a man in the photograph is wearing sunglasses clipped to the front of his shirt. Gizzo suggests that her guest take a very close look at the sunglasses.