The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) hosted its 10th annual Art+Film Gala on November 6, 2021, honoring artists Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley and filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Co-chaired by LACMA trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio, the event was attended by more than 650 prominent guests from the art, film, fashion, and entertainment industries, among others.
This year’s event raised $5 million to support LACMA’s film initiatives, as well as future exhibitions, acquisitions, and programming. Returning once again as presenting sponsor of the Art+Film Gala, Gucci expanded its longstanding and generous partnership with the museum by supporting LACMA’s presentation of The Obama Portraits Tour and the companion exhibition Black American Portraits. Audi provided additional support for the gala for the third year. Congratulations to the honorees and LACMA for another successful event.
2021 Art + Film Gala Honorees
HONOREE AMY SHERALD – Amy Sherald (b. 1973, Columbus) documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly figurative paintings. She reengages with the history of photography and portraiture to invite viewers to participate in a more complex debate about accepted notions of race and representation, and to situate Black heritage centrally in American art. Sherald is based in the greater New York (City) area.
Sherald received her MFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and BA in painting from Clark-Atlanta University. Sherald was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC; she also received the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman award and the 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. Sherald’s work is held in public collections such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Embassy of the United States, Dakar, Senegal; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC.
HONOREE KEHINDE WILEY – Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is an American artist best known for his portraits that render people of color in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings. Wiley’s work brings art history face-to-face with contemporary culture, using the visual rhetoric of the heroic, the powerful, the majestic, and the sublime to celebrate Black and brown people the artist has met throughout the world. Working in the mediums of painting, sculpture, and video, Wiley’s portraits challenge and reorient art-historical narratives, awakening complex issues that many would prefer remain muted.
In 2018 Wiley became the first African American artist to paint an official U.S. Presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. Former U.S. President Barack Obama selected Wiley for this honor. In 2019 Wiley founded Black Rock Senegal, a multidisciplinary artist-in-residence program that invites artists from around the world to live and create work in Dakar, Senegal.
Wiley is the recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Medal of Arts, Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Medal, and France’s distinction of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. He holds a BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from Yale University, and honorary doctorates from the Rhode Island School of Design and San Francisco Art Institute. He has held solo exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally and his works are included in the collections of over 50 public institutions around the world. He lives and works in Beijing, Dakar, and New York.
HONOREE STEVEN SPIELBERG – Steven Spielberg is one of the world’s most successful and influential filmmakers, and is currently chairman of Amblin Partners, a corporate descendent of DreamWorks, SKG, which he co-founded in 1994. Among a host of career accolades, he is a three-time Academy Award winner, a Kennedy Center Honoree, a recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 from President Barack Obama.
Spielberg has devoted much of his time and resources to many philanthropic causes. He formed The Righteous Persons Foundation by using all his profits from the release of Schindler’s List, and soon thereafter founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which in 2006 became the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. The Institute has recorded more than 55,000 video testimonies with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, and is dedicated to making the testimonies a compelling voice for education and action.
In 2021, Spielberg and Kate Capshaw formally launched The Hearthland Foundation, a philanthropic fund to help build a more just, equitable, and connected America. Inspired by the words of the poet Langston Hughes, “O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—And yet must be,” Hearthland is founded on the belief that creating a better shared future for our country calls for relationships that cross divides and the moral imagination for what is possible. To that end, the foundation has three overlapping areas of focus: building a shared democracy; telling an honest and generative narrative about this country; and fostering a culture of accompaniment.
Renowned artists, distinguished guests, and luminaries from the art, film, fashion, music, and entertainment industries arrived at the Art+Film Gala’s red carpet adjacent to Chris Burden’s iconic Urban Light (2008) on Wilshire Boulevard. View photos from the enchanting evening below.
