When someone visits the Broad museum for the first time, they usually ask one of three questions, says curator Ed Schad: Where is the Infinity Room, where is the Balloon Dog or where is the table?
“The table” is a reference to artist Robert Therrien’s 1994 sculpture, “Under the Table,” which was the very first piece of art installed at the museum when it opened in 2015. It consists of a 20-foot-long wooden table with six matching chairs each nearly 10 feet tall. Photos of museumgoers standing and grinning beneath it litter social media.
“We want that question to turn into a profound understanding of the man who made it,” Schad continues, referring to the largest-ever solo museum show of Therrien’s work — titled “Robert Therrien: This Is a Story” — scheduled to open Nov. 22 and run through April 5, 2026.
Therrien is famous for his large-scale sculptures — towering stacks of vertigo-inducing dishes, giant beards, enormous folding chairs and oversized pots and pans in humongous cupboards — but each piece is a “trap door,” says Schad.
“You may think you’ve got it right away and then the floor falls out,” he says.
Paul Cherwick and Dean Anes, who are co-directors of the artist’s estate and worked closely with Therrien for years before his death in 2019, elaborate on Schad’s assessment.
“He didn’t talk about blowing things up. He talked about creating an environment that you had a reaction to,” Anes says during a recent tour of Therrien’s studio and apartment near downtown L.A. “So much of it is about his childhood memories and experiences. And his interest, I feel, was to be able to give viewers an opportunity to trigger their own childhood memories and feelings and experiences through the work.”
Standing beneath a Therrien table does, indeed, produce vague — sometimes unsettling — recollections of being a small human in a not-yet-understood world of big things. If Therrien’s sculptures symbolize the unknown, he did not talk about it, says Cherwick. The artist kept his underlying intentions to himself.
Therrien’s legacy is best examined through his relationship — and importance — with sculpture in L.A., says Schad.
“It sounds grandiose, but it’s true, Los Angeles is one of the best places to make sculpture on Earth,” he says, rattling off a who’s who of famous L.A.-based sculptors, including Robert Irwin, Helen Pashgian, Larry Bell and John McCracken, who was also Therrien’s friend.
The list of L.A. artists who have made “fantastic contributions to the global discussion about sculpture goes on and on and on,” says Schad. “Robert Therrien was not only a part of that conversation, but was vitally present.”
Therrien showed his work with famed art dealers Leo Castelli and Konrad Fischer, and was featured in the 1985 Whitney Biennial and the 1995 Carnegie International. He was also one of the artists that Eli and Edythe Broad collected most. There are 18 Therrien pieces in their collection, spanning his entire career. The Broads first met and befriended Therrien as a nervous young artist who brought a poodle for emotional support during their first meeting in the 1970s.
The upcoming exhibition at the Broad will feature 120 pieces of work, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing and other ephemera, occupying the entire 10,000-square-foot ground floor. It will include an intimate series of never-before-seen smoke signals — cartoonish puffs of white smoke — fabricated on stretched car upholstery that Therrien made when he was dying of cancer and could barely lift a pen.
“When you look at his career as a whole, it speaks in a very intimate way to what Los Angeles is — and was — as a city,” Schad says. Therrien was wild and experimental in the 1970s, as part of a feral community of artists who interacted and shared ideas with scientists at Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This led to experimentation with the revolutionary methods of fabrication that would later define the scene.
“The city has so much space as well,” says Anes. “Early on, of course, rents were cheaper. You could get an industrial space and you could be left alone. Bob carved this space out — created it himself — and he didn’t have neighbors. He was here by himself, developing ideas and working on things.”
The artist Cherwick and Anes describe was a quiet, reserved man with an excellent sense of humor. A solitary figure who preferred working alone and needed large doses of St. John’s wort to get through days when his studio buzzed with people. He was 6 feet, 2 inches, wore a size 12 shoe and sported a suit jacket that was slightly too big. He was a ruminative thinker, and often brought a book as a gift when he visited someone.
“He had a sort of Fred Gwynne quality to him,” says Cherwick, referring to the actor who played Herman Munster in the ’60s sitcom “The Munsters.”
“He was very sweet,” adds Anes. “I kind of refer to him as your favorite odd uncle.”
Above all, they say, Therrien was a consummate worker.
“That’s all he lived to do,” says Cherwick, looking around the studio. “He was in here working all the time — at all times. He made his whole life and existence about just being here.”
Therrien’s studio was built in 1990 but designed to resemble an industrial, institution-like space from the ’30s or ’40s. The exterior walls are his signature salmon pink and the toilets are almost a century old. The ground floor was his creative playground, filled with supplies, tools and large pieces of art, including a giant beard that greets guests upon arrival.
There is a Shaker-inspired gallery upstairs with ceilings that are almost 16 feet tall. Therrien never opened the gallery to the public but often hosted museum groups and curators, taking them to his adjacent apartment afterward and lingering over a long lunch of salad served from a giant bowl.
Since the studio was built before live-work spaces were common, Therrien had to design his modest apartment as a “watchman’s quarters” in order to adhere to building code. It features a vintage kitchen with pink-and-white tiling, drab olive walls and industrial brown flooring.
The “heroes” that inspired his giant dishes rest on the counter and the influence for “Under the Table” is his actual dining table. Polaroids, knick knacks and mementos are carefully arranged in various tableaus — much as he left them. A closet-sized space across from the bathroom houses shelves of vinyl records, tapes and DVDs. Stereolab, Duke Ellington, “Sounds of Halloween” and a mixtape labeled “Bob Foo Young” are among the eclectic auditory selection. Therrien loved music and had the studio wired with speakers. Before that, he put a tape deck on a rolling cart.
His bedroom always surprises guests, says Cherwick, stepping into the small, windowless rectangular space. It features only a single twin bed covered with a simple quilt on a severe-looking iron frame. A small crucifix is affixed to the wall above, and a rolling, pink-topped hospital table sits on the far side of the room.
“This is the last thing everybody sees,” says Anes. “The last statement.”
“He was a big guy … that was not enough bed for him,” adds Cherwick. “He became out of scale with his own existence.”
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