Frank Gehry and Theaster Gates Honored at Star-Studded MOCA Gala

On Saturday night, over 600 power players from the worlds of entertainment, art and philanthropy thronged The Geffen Contemporary for the 2025 MOCA Gala, raising $3.1 million for LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art. 

The swirl of notable guests and presenters included House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, Mayor Karen Bass, Ava DuVernay, Jane Fonda, Sarah Paulson, Candy Spelling, Lisa Edelstein, David Alan Grier, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie, Tim Disney, Julie Wainwright, Edythe Broad, Jeffery Dietch, Michael Govan and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot.  

The gala, co-sponsored by Bvlgari (which showcased covetable jewels during cocktail hour), honored inaugural MOCA Legends Theaster Gates, Frank Gehry and Wendy Schmidt.  Johanna Burton, director of MOCA, said the new awards are a way to recognize people “who have helped write the stories of MOCA past, present, and future.” 

“It’s a frame that will allow people to celebrate the institution,” Burton said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter before the event. “But also to really celebrate these people who make our work possible every day.”

Embracing the importance of community and collaboration between multiple fields in the face of oppression was clearly on top of everyone’s minds throughout the evening. 

“Something that’s special about MOCA, its always actually pushed the limits of what art making is and who defines it and what it looks like,” Burton said. “It began as a very multidisciplinary experimental, risk-taking space. And I think we’re really encouraging and thinking about that now.”

Glittering guests mingled during cocktail hour and took selfies in ballgowns in front of monumental mirrored sculptures while exploring the MOCA Geffen’s current exhibition Olafur Eliasson: OPEN. They were then led into the gala by the TAIKOPROJECT Japanese drum ensemble.

Inside the Frank Gehry designed event space, decked out with multicolored globes of light and black tablescapes, guests enjoyed dinner as the program began. MOCA board chair Maria Seferian kicked off the event, sounding a battle cry for the arts. 

“Museums are collections of stuff with people and places, but at their heart, museums are really just an idea, creativity, possibility, imagination. In other words, freedom,” Seferian said. “Freedom. We need that now, freedom to imagine and to act outside the different confines of circumstance. Art has the ability to change how we see and understand something past or present or future. It’s a language that connects feeling to knowledge, to activate action, to spark a paradigm shift, to interrogate and create identity.”

Johanna Burton echoed this sentiment in her remarks. “I’ve always believed deeply that culture is crucial to a civic society,” she said, “There is no greater time to embrace that idea.”

Ava DuVernay presented the first MOCA Legends Award to multidisciplinary artist Theaster Gates, whose first major solo show on the West Coast was at MOCA in 2001. Gates was celebrated as a modern-day Renaissance man whose practice incorporates sculpture, conceptual formalism, music, performance, land art and space theory to create community.

“Theaster Gates is the whole band,” an effusive DuVernay said. “He’s the lead singer calling out to something eternal. He’s the bassist, holding down the bottom, grounding it all. He’s the drummer, beating out time, creating momentum. He’s the guitarist bending strings into something never heard before. He’s the saxophone, swirling through the soul of the thing, mournful and ecstatic all at once.”

DuVernay also celebrated Gates’ work preserving and uplifting Black history and culture. “He’s a builder, but not just of buildings, of legacies, of spaces for joy and resistance, for worship and imagination and reimagination,” she said. He’s a bridge between what was and what can be, between the Black archive and the Black future. What’s in between? Theaster.”

Gates graciously accepted his honor, noting the importance of supporting creatives.  “It’s about living a life where you take your talent and you multiply it, and you do the very, very, very best you can to create inspiration by taking those talents and watching them multiply,” he said.  

“I feel like I’m constantly looking at black and brown talent in my neighborhood and no one’s invested in them,” he said. “And in fact, they are burying black talent all the fucking time. And is it possible that we would just take a moment to imagine that the talent around us has the capacity to do greater than it does? So when the queen comes home, the talent is producing beautiful things. My job is to make talent, to be talented, to multiply talents. And really all I want is for the world to say, ‘Well done thy good and faithful servant. Well done.’”

Jane Fonda, passionate and witty as always, introduced another MOCA Legends Award recipient, the philanthropist and investor Wendy Schmidt. Schmidt has spent decades creating innovative non-profit organizations working with communities to build healthy oceans, renewable energy, sustainable food systems and human rights. Along with her husband, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, she funded MOCA’s Wendy and Eric Schmidt Environment and Art Prize which honors and funds artists whose practices address critical intersections in art, design, conservation, suitability and environmental justice. 

“She is an avid puzzler,” Fonda said of Schmidt. “It’s no accident that she acquired Jigsaw Productions earlier this year. She sees how pieces fit together, she sees the big picture, she sees how the world can be while the rest of us just see a mess.”

Fonda also managed to get in a good-natured dig at her ex-husband: “She is a competitive sailor. She was the first woman and the first American to win the world’s largest sailing race. She’s a petite woman, and she has captained enormous ships with all-male crews, with focus and determination and tenacity, and she leads them to victory. And so, I say, take that Ted Turner.”

Taking the stage, Schmidt joked, “It’s obviously an honor and a challenge to take the mic after Jane Fonda was just here.”

Schmidt went on to make an inspired and impassioned speech encouraging multi-disciplinary collaboration to benefit humanity. “Art and science working together allows all of us to see the world and approach challenges in a far richer, nuanced and more promising way. This is why our philanthropy crosses disciplines, deliberately seeing what happens at the edges of things, where they intersect. That’s where changes happen.”  

“I see science and art as two sides of the same coin; each of them rests on a single necessary foundation. Freedom of thought, freedom to imagine and to create is part of human nature and is the underpinning of a free society. And that’s why any talk of improper ideology in our country sits sideways with me. If you try to undermine scientific inquiry you’ll also suppress artistic expression. The good news is in practice it’s hard to do, because humans are curious and we like to communicate. We’re also gifted with imagination and we will find a way to use it. Like water, human curiosity and human expression will always find a way.”

Perhaps the most moving part of the evening was the presentation of the third and final MOCA Legends Award to renowned architect Frank Gehry, who renovated the old warehouse which houses the MOCA Geffen. “Frank Gehry is a magician because with his architecture he enables people to see the art differently, to hear the music differently, to understand the education differently,” Nancy Pelosi said. “He is a magician who turns whatever is happening into something that is very well understood.”

Pelosi also hit on the theme of community. “Architecture is architecture, but it’s art.  It’s art for the community. He has listened to the community about what this structure will be. He designs it around the community. It’s about culture, it’s about community, it’s about communication.”

The 96-year-old Gehry spoke from his table in a soft voice, but his words reverberated throughout the hall. “MOCA means a lot to me,” said Gehry, speaking on the impact of artists on his personal life and architectural practice early on in his career. “Artists brought me into their club — it’s where I wanted to be, and they opened my eyes to another world.”

The night ended with a rousing performance by Grammy-nominated Tierra Whack. Donors, artists, and curators left their tables to dance and mingle, a community determined to thrive in our uncertain future.