After thinking about it for a moment, Thelma Golden estimated she’d had already attended about a dozen galas this season.
“It’s a wonderful way to feel the soul of the city,” she said.
But the gala closest to her heart took place on Monday evening to benefit the Studio Museum in Harlem in Midtown.
“This is our gala,” said Ms. Golden, the museum’s director and its chief curator for the last 20 years.
The evening, which raised more than $3.7 million, supports programs and exhibitions at the museum as the institution prepares to reopen next fall in a new, modern, terrazzo-stacked building in Central Harlem.
It was also a reunion for many of its 700 guests. Artists working in all types of media, along with gallerists, philanthropists, journalists, actors, businessmen and restaurateurs, packed into the Glasshouse, a sleek event space with views of the Hudson River.
“It celebrates our past,” Ms. Golden said, “and always, always our legacy, our present, and our projects in the future.”
Entering the party, Ms. Golden posed for a photo with the curatorial team, and then gracefully sidestepped questions about art world murmurs that she is a top contender to be the next director of the Museum of Modern Art. (Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s longtime director, recently announced he would depart in September 2025.)
Around the room, there were artists including Dawoud Bey, Jordan Casteel, Glenn Ligon, Carrie Mae Weems and the Nigerian American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola, who won the evening’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, a $50,000 award that each year goes to an African American artist who shows innovation and creativity.
Attendees also included the musician Solange Knowles and her mother, Tina Knowles; the actress Nicole Ari Parker; the newscasters Maurice DuBois, Deborah Roberts and Lester Holt; and the producer Tonya Lewis Lee.
“These are people who love arts and culture and understand the power of art, and recognize the importance of artists of African American descent and of the diaspora,” said Raymond J. McGuire, the president at the financial firm Lazard and chairman on the museum’s board of trustees. (His own art collection goes back to Nok terra-cotta from 300 B.C., and includes contemporary works by many artists at the gala.)
Ms. Wilson, who runs Melba’s, a Harlem restaurant fixture, was festively dressed, in a bright orange dress with feathers.
“I’m from Harlem,” she said. “It doesn’t get better than this. This is Black excellence.”
Around 8 p.m., a wall of black curtains were parted and guests entered a dining area set with dozens of tables laid with burrata and butternut squash, followed by seared arctic char with orange-saffron sauce. Hudson Horns Collective, played “What’s Going On” over the chatter.
Danny Meyer, the restaurateur who runs the Union Square hospitality group, which catered the event, remembered consulting with Ms. Golden when he was scouting locations to open a new Shake Shack location in Harlem.
“She whispered in my ear about places,” he said.
During dinner Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, took the stage to reflect on the history of the museum, which opened in 1968 in a small space above a liquor store on Fifth Avenue in East Harlem.
Mr. Walker then announced a generous gifts: He said the Ford Foundation had made a $10 million endowment, which will support the museum’s director and chief curator.
As dessert revved up so did the band, which played “The Way You Move” as guests danced with hands up in the air and drinks in hand.
Derrick Adams, an artist known for his colorful figurative work who won the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2016, observed the action as Ms. Odutola, this year’s winner, made her way off the crowded dance floor.
“Overall it’s like a family,” Mr. Adams said. “Artists before me, and following me.”
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