PHOTOS: Inside The New York Academy of Art’s Annual Tribeca Ball

Eddie Roche, Alan Cumming and Cynthia Rowley. Matteo Prandoni/BFA.com

The New York Academy of Art’s annual benefit is the rare gala evening that skips the ballroom formality and puts the art front and center. Last week, guests with cocktails in hand meandered through the Academy’s studios, engaging directly with its latest cohort of talented MFA candidates, who showed off paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints they’ve developed over the course of an intensive year. This is one of the more genuinely moving evenings on New York’s cultural calendar—part party and part preview of the works you’ll be seeing on gallery walls and in auction houses before too long.

The guest list reflected the Academy’s particular place in New York’s art ecosystem: serious enough to draw cultural heavy hitters but lively enough to pull a crowd beyond the patron class. Art world professionals Barbara Guggenheim, Rose Dergan and Gabriel Florenz mingled with philanthropists Nicole Salmasi, George Sard and Susan Wasserstein, while patrons and collectors Bill Jacob and Sharon Jacob, Stephanie French and Suzanne Cochran kept company with a host of artists: Will Cotton, Vincent Desiderio, Neil Jenney, Alyssa Monks, Carla Shen and Pioneer Works Dustin Yellin among them. Fashion designers Nicole Miller and Cynthia Rowley, photographer Sophie Elgort, television producer and writer Bob Cochran, media personality Kit Keenan and actor William Abadie rounded out a crowd that read, appropriately, like a cross-section of the city’s creative and philanthropic life.

Model Bazhan Iuliia peruses the art on show. Matteo Prandoni/BFA.com

At the conclusion of the cocktail hour, glamorously looming, color-coordinated stilt-walkers pointed the crowd toward a seated dinner at tables framed by hand-painted floral murals. Actor Chris Hanke led a spirited auction round, and the room raised over $900,000 in support of the Academy’s student scholarships and public programming—a huge win for the independent graduate school, which relies on exactly that kind of generosity to ensure access for talented artists from diverse backgrounds. (We’d wager that most attendees felt the pull of the paddle.)

Beyond the studio encounters, the evening’s most meaningful moments centered on this year’s honorees. Acclaimed actor and longtime Academy supporter Alan Cumming received the night’s tribute alongside philanthropists Eileen Guggenheim and Russell Wilkinson, a co-founder of the Academy and a longtime trustee. Their daughter, Isabel Wilkinson Schor, shared stories that spoke to the hands-on nature of her parents’ decades of dedication to the institution in a tribute that reminded the room why these evenings exist in the first place.