Brooklyn Museum to Honor Titus Kaphar at 2024 Brooklyn Artists Ball

Brooklyn Artists Ball, 2023. (Photo: Matthew Carasella)

After Party tickets on sale now

On Tuesday, April 9, 2024, the Brooklyn Museum will host its thirteenth annual Brooklyn Artists Ball, presented by Dior. This year, the Artists Ball honors Titus Kaphar Brooklyn Museum Trustee, artist, and Cofounder and President of NXTHVN for his innumerable contributions as both a trailblazing artist and a community-focused activist. The Artists Ball is the Museum’s largest fundraiser, generating pivotal revenue in support of programming that spans special exhibitions and reimagined collection installations as well as educational programs for visitors of all ages.

“We are thrilled to be honoring Titus Kaphar, an artist of great humanity, community builder, and trustee who has made a profound impact on both our Museum and contemporary culture as a whole,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director, Brooklyn Museum.

The Brooklyn Museum and Kaphar share a rich history, marked by inclusion of his groundbreaking work in important exhibitions like The Legacy of Lynching: Confronting Racial Terror in America (2017) and the current presentation Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys. Notably, the Museum’s collection holds his iconic work Shifting the Gaze (2017). The painting is a reinterpretation of a 17th-century Dutch artwork, and it gained widespread attention when Kaphar completed it onstage during his 2017 TED Talk. In the dramatic finale of the talk, he boldly whitewashed the canvas with broad strokes of paint, leaving a Black boy at the center of the composition. In doing so, Kaphar brought into focus those individuals who are often deliberately overlooked in the historical record. He has continued this practice as Cofounder and President of NXTHVN, an arts incubator empowering artists, curators, and the New Haven community through education, mentorship, collaboration, and engagement. Through NXTHVN, Kaphar and his team have greatly supported artists with resources and training needed for a successful practice and career, while intentionally transforming New Haven into a world-class, sustainable arts community. In 2021, Kaphar founded his film production company Revolution Ready as an extension, through film, of his painting and sculpture studio practice. He has since produced several films, including Shut Up and Paint (2022), a short documentary short-listed for an Academy Award, and his forthcoming feature Exhibiting Forgiveness, which just premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim.

This year, Dior has continued its support as the lead sponsor of the Artists Ball. The fashion house has formed a strong partnership with the Museum, from the blockbuster exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams (2021–22) to the 2022 Artists Ball, which honored Maria Grazia Chiuri, Dior’s Creative Director of women’s haute couture, ready-to-wear, and accessories collections. Furthering this powerful alliance, Dior will unveil its fall 2024 collection, envisioned by Chiuri, at the Brooklyn Museum on April 15, 2024.

The Artists Ball evening will begin with a cocktail reception in the Museum’s lobby at 6:30 pm, followed by an elegant seated dinner in the Beaux-Arts Court at 7:30 pm. Guests will be treated to a menu developed and catered by Yann Nury. At 9 pm, Swizz Beatz will headline the Artists Ball’s always-lively After Party alongside a set of to-be-announced guest performances.

Tickets for the 2024 Brooklyn Artists Ball start at $2,500, and tables including tickets for ten guests start at $25,000. Tickets to the After Party start at $125, with discounts for Museum Members. For more information about the Artists Ball, please email brooklynartistsball@brooklynmuseum.org.

Event Chairs
Regina Aldisert
Sasha Bass
Maria Grazia Chiuri
Henry Elsesser
Marley B. Lewis
Victoria Rogers
Carla Shen

Honorary Chairs
Jamie and Robert Soros
Barbara and John Vogelstein

Host Committee
Nina Chanel Abney
Marina Abramović
Derrick Adams
María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Judy Chicago
KAWS and Julia Chiang
Takashi Murakami
Antwaun Sargent Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham
Kehinde Wiley
Hank Willis Thomas
Kennedy Yanko

Benefit Committee
Regina Aldisert
Bank of America
Sasha and Edward P. Bass
Tamara and Greg Belinfanti
Bloomberg Philanthropies
Megan and Thomas Brodsky
Deenie and Frank Brosens
Rona and Jeffrey Citrin
Dior
Jodie Factor and Jonathan Donnellan
Dana Ben-Ari and Nikola Duravcevic
Kathy and Henry Elsesser
Sharon Fay and Maxine Schaffer
Michael Field and Doug Hamilton
Amanda and Glenn Fuhrman
Agnes Gund
Kathy and Steven Guttman
Jane Hait and Justin Beal
Stephanie and Tim Ingrassia
Jenner & Block
Michi Jigarjian
Elizabeth and William Kahane
Karen Kiehl and Peter Labbat
Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins
Marley B. Lewis and Yevgeny Vilensky
Lynne Maguire and Will Miller
Joel Mallin
McKinsey & Company
Stephanie Neville and Alan Beller
Joanna Pozen and Anna Brenner
Leslie and David Puth
Tracey and Phillip Riese
Debbie and Jonathan Rosen
Carla Shen and Christopher Schott
Jamie and Robert Soros
A. Alfred Taubman Foundation
Colleen and Graves Tompkins
Barbara and John Vogelstein
Amanda and John Waldron
Heather and Sean Ward
Kelly Williams and Andrew Forsyth
Saundra Williams-Cornwell and W. Don Cornwell
Matt Wilson and Sarah Chen

About Titus Kaphar
Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He awakened a lifelong interest in art history while attending junior college, taking a course that alerted him to his affinity for visual learning. He earned a BFA in studio art at San José State University, California, in 2001, and an MFA at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, in 2006. Kaphar’s paintings are multilayered, sometimes sculptural, through his manipulations: slashes, erasures, and swipes of paint aim to reflect the ways in which certain histories are obscured, lost, or waiting to be revealed. In a 2017 TED Talk he expounded the impact of art-making on amending the art-historical canon by demonstrating his practice in real time, applying broad paint strokes of white onto one of his canvases to create a new work, which now lives in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. Kaphar founded the film production company Revolution Ready as an extension of his art practice in 2021, and his feature film Exhibiting Forgiveness premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Other works are held by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Detroit Institute of Arts; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Kaphar, also a recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut, where he cofounded the arts incubator NXTHVN.

About the Brooklyn Museum
At the Brooklyn Museum, art is a vital force for personal transformation and social change. For 200 years, the Museum has expanded the definitions of art and what it means to be a museum by revealing untold stories and uplifting our shared humanity. Among the oldest, largest, and boldest art museums in the United States, the Brooklyn Museum holds an encyclopedic collection of over 500,000 objects representing more than 5,500 years of creativity from cultures around the globe. Highlights range from ancient Egyptian masterpieces and world-class American works to our Center for Feminist Art, the only one of its kind in the country. Housed in a landmark building in the heart of Brooklyn, the Museum is dedicated to its communities both near and far and remains an advocate for growth, healing, and social change.