The Whitney Museum’s Art Party Goes Full Throttle After Dark
The annual winter fundraiser drew a tightly packed downtown crowd for DJ sets by The Dare and after-hours access to its current exhibitions
The evening of January 27 was just another Tuesday night in downtown Manhattan—unless you were a partygoer dancing in the packed piazza of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Guests of the museum’s young patrons group, the Whitney Contemporaries, filled the glass-walled lobby to capacity for the museum’s annual Art Party benefit, which eschews coursed dinners and speeches for a night of cocktails, dancing, DJ sets, and after-hours visits to the museum’s current exhibitions to benefit its support of emerging artists.
The gala and benefit world is hardly wanting for sparkle, but this year’s Art Party took on a notably glitzier sheen than years past. In December, on the heels of his much-hyped closing set at the Silencio pop-up during Art Basel Miami Beach, The Dare was announced as the night’s DJ “headliner.” Much of the same crowd that packed the basement of the Miami Beach Edition to see the musician just last month filtered into the museum beginning in the early evening, when Aesop hosted a pre-Art Party VIP cocktail and viewing of Ken Ohara’s “Contacts” exhibition in the museum’s third-floor gallery.
The party began with a smattering of early turnouts sipping wine and making polite conversation downstairs, but took a noticeably more exuberant turn as the evening progressed. Guests done up to meet the event’s maximalist dress code took turns jumping on and off the step-and-repeat—sometimes in front of one another—while the downstairs bartenders did their best to entice the growing crowd with wine and batched cocktails. Many a stirred martini still circulated, despite their commendable efforts. By this point, DJ Raúl de Nieves took to the stage, and some attendees took leave of the lobby to wander the upstairs galleries.
Many ventured to the eighth floor, slipping behind the oxblood velvet curtain and into “High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Isamu Noguchi before them, partygoers delighted in discovering the study of kinetics and pure whimsy of the late sculptor’s miniature carnival. Others, perhaps, found refuge in the gallery’s hushed tones and soft lighting, as the lobby crowd downstairs swelled with late arrivals who remembered when The Dare took to the DJ booth in Miami at nearly 1:00 A.M.
This time, the musician, whose take on the evening’s call to bold style meant ditching his signature Saint Laurent suiting and shades for a striped tee and blazer, began playing promptly at 10:30 P.M. By that point everyone from New York City’s First Lady Rama Duwaji to Martha Stewart, Ego Nwodim, Jennifer Fisher, Scott Rothkopf, and more guests from across the worlds of art, entertainment, fashion, and commerce had arrived for the occasion. By midnight, the final guests had dispersed into the windblown night and onto Gansevoort Street—with an Aesop goodie bag in hand.
Scroll below to see more highlights from the star-studded evening.
