Broad museum events include ‘Selma’ director Ava DuVernay, Karen Finley as Jackie O

The new Broad museum in Los Angeles has announced events programming that will include performance artist Karen Finley, electronic music group Helado Negro and “Selma” director Ava DuVernay.

Five ongoing series will focus on film, music, performance art, hands-on family art events and public talks about art and architecture. Unlike admission to the museum, which is free, all but the family series will have an admission fee, with tickets or reservations starting at 1 p.m. Thursday on the website of the venues, which include the Broad’s neighbors, Walt Disney Concert Hall and REDCAT.

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Finley, whose 1980s rise as a controversial performance artist had the unintended consequence of starting a political avalanche that led to the decimation of federal arts grants, will headline the first installment of “The Tip of Her Tongue.” The series on feminist performing artists will be overseen by guest curator Jennifer Doyle, a professor at UC Riverside. Finley will perform Nov. 20-21 in the Oculus Hall at the Broad museum.

“Callings Out of Context,” a concert program described as an “aural complement” to the Broad’s pop art holdings, will be curated by composer Ted Hearne. The first program, Nov. 5 at REDCAT, features the electronic music group Helado Negro, led by producer-singer Roberto Carlos Lange, and Rabbit Rabbit, a husband-and-wife duo of singer-violinist Carla Kihlstedt and percussionist-keyboardist-singer Matthias Bossi. Tickets are $25.

“Array @The Broad” will consist of films picked by an arts collective founded by “Selma” director DuVernay that promote movies by women and people of color. The series opens Dec. 10 at REDCAT with Martin Ritt’s 1961 film “Paris Blues,” starring Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Diahann Carroll and Joanne Woodward in a story about racial issues among American expatriate jazz musicians in France. Tickets are $20.

Family Weekend Workshops are free quarterly events that begin Nov. 14-15 at locations around the Broad, offering programs in which parents and children can learn about art while making their own souvenirs. It’s curated by Community Arts Resources.

The fifth series is a holdover: the speakers series “The Un-Private Collection” that the Broad began in 2013 to create a programming foothold in advance of the museum’s opening. The next installment is “Designing the Broad,” a panel discussion about the museum’s architecture Nov 2. at Walt Disney Concert Hall. That will feature architect Elizabeth Diller, museum founder Eli Broad and museum director Joanne Heyler with architecture critic Paul Goldberger as moderator. Tickets are $15 and available on the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s website.

Finley will perform “The Jackie Look,” a performance piece she debuted in 2010 in which she inhabits the role of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis discoursing on violence, grief and fame. The New York Times’ review was headlined “Karen Finley Wears Pearls, Not Chocolate,” an allusion to the days when Finley performed wearing nothing but smeared chocolate and became a flashpoint for the “culture wars” that culminated in Congress’ drastically slashing the National Endowment for the Arts’ funding. Tickets are $30 and available on the Broad’s website.

The Broad also announced it’s developing a museum-visit program for children in grades 3-12, in conjunction with the education organizations 826LA and Inner-City Arts. It expects to host 3,000 children on 30 visiting days between January, when the program starts, and May. Teachers who want to bring a class can apply for a slot via the Broad’s website starting Nov. 30 (grades 3-8) or Jan. 18 (grades 9-12).

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