For the past two years, Sotheby’s has hosted benefit auctions to raise money for the Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit organization in New York that aims to protect LGBTQ+ youth from homelessness. This year, art adviser Stephen Truax, a former director at Cheim & Read who helped organized last year’s auction, is partnering with David Zwirner Gallery on a similar endeavor, with proceeds again benefiting Ali Forney, which provides housing, meals, healthcare, and career training to queer youth.
The exhibition, titled “Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center,” opens Tuesday evening at David Zwirner’s 19th Street space and will be on view through Saturday, November 1. Compared to the previous iterations at Sotheby’s—which each included six artworks by six artists—“Toward the Light” is much more robust. Truax and his collaborators at the gallery gathered 41 artworks by 38 contemporary artists. (Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, and Roberto Gil de Montes contributed two works each.)
“We brought in well over a million dollars in material consignments,” Truax told ARTnews, noting that the exhibition’s affiliation with Zwirner this year attracted “high-level artists who believe in the project and wanted to participate.”
A handful of the participating artists—Tillmans, Welling, Joe Bradley, Marlene Dumas, Marcel Dzama, and Suzan Frecon—are represented by Zwirner, but the rest are not affiliated with the gallery. Several of this year’s artists participated in previous iterations of the event, including Katherine Bradford, Ilana Savdie, Jenna Gribbon, and Doron Langberg, who organized the 2023 exhibition at Sotheby’s and is a close friend of Truax’s.
Truax told ARTnews that the switch from Sotheby’s to a gallery environment allows for more control over who the artworks sell to, and for how much. “You want to maintain price consistency and build confidence in the market,” Truax said. Two-thirds of the artists donated their work outright, with all the proceeds going to Ali Forney; the rest chose a 50-50 split with the nonprofit. Among the biggest names in “Toward the Light” are Julie Mehretu, Marlene Dumas, Jenna Gribbon, Jenny Holzer, Laurie Simmons, and Stanley Whitney.
One thing Truax wants to make clear: this isn’t your typical benefit exhibition full of leftover inventory and “bad works on paper,” he said, adding “for me, it’s really important for this to be a win-win-win, for the artists and the charity and the gallery.”
Below are highlights from the exhibition.
