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.
Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging/The Broad Art Foundation

I can easily spend hours wandering museum galleries – viewing Art, artifacts and people – it’s all fascinating. More likely than not every other room I’ll pass an ever present museum guards, usually efficient, sometimes friendly. Always in uniform. The directors of The Broad Museum in L.A. are viewing this important role in a new light. Dressed eclectically in black with red lanyard IDs, the VSAs (Visitor Service Associates) are well-trained crosses between guard and guide. Their knowledge and friendly delivery creates a concierge museum experience, which seems especially appropriate for a private collection museum.

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.

Why? Turns out, if you look closely, a famous statue can be seen in the reflection of the man’s glasses: Michelangelo’s sculpture of David.

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