Out & About
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The Studio Museum in Harlem’s annual gala is one of the hottest tickets in the country.
One reason is the work of the museum’s president, Lowery Stokes Sims, and director, Thelma Golden. They mount challenging exhibitions and pour their energies into nurturing African-American artists. Their next show, “Frequency,” opening November 9, will show emerging artists between the ages of 25 and 42.
Another reason is the zest the black community has developed for supporting its national artistic legacy. The Studio Museum in Harlem landed on the map with the help of affluent professionals who made it a priority: people such as the chairman, Raymond McGuire, a Wall Street heavy hitter who also serves on the Whitney Museum of American Art board; the former chairman who hired Ms. Sims away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art five years ago, George Knox, and the board’s treasurer, Reginald Van Lee, who has just completed a strategic plan for the museum. The outlook? More space and more opportunities.
Then there are all those happy feet. No one wants to sit down at this party because the opportunity to network is just too good. And when the band starts playing, both standards and not-so-standards (the Black Eyed Peas’ “Let’s Get It Started,” for example), the whole place starts to rock and sway. The energy in the room is transforming.
A Hollywood producer who flew in for the event hit on two key elements: “It’s the diversity of people and the fact that people actually dance,” Debra Martin Chase, whose credits include “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,” said.
An investment banker, Barry Adams, said he’d never seen so many black millionaires in one room, while the writer and producer Susan Fales-Hill, a glamorous presence at so many fund-raisers in town, focused on attitude.
“Many of the people who go to parties are pretentious. Not here. And everyone is dressed so beautifully,” she said. (I particularly admired her gold leather trench coat.)
More than 900 guests attended the event, which raised a record $1.7 million for the museum. Guests included the artists Donald Sultan, Glenn Ligon, and Fred Wilson (who has a show at PaceWildenstein in March), and the executive director of the soon-to-open Museum of the African Diaspora, Denise Bradley.
After the dancing, people were ready to throw off their high heels. Jack O’Kelly, a management consultant and supporter of the museum who just happens to live around the corner from where the gala is held, provided the setting: a spacious apartment filled with art and antiques from Paris. Long after the band had gone home, Ms. Sims was still accepting congratulations from a perch on Mr. O’Kelly’s guest bed. Joining her was her childhood friend and fellow art historian, Leslie King-Hammond, a dean at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
