The Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art has announced the honorees for its annual Art+Film Gala, chaired by returning hosts Leonardo DiCaprio and LACAMA trustee Eva Chow.
This year’s star-studded event on Nov. 7 will honor artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. The Art + Film gala raises funds for LACMA’s exhibition, acquisition, and education programming, with a special focus on projects at the intersection of visual art and film.
Last year’s gala honored Ryan Coogler and Mary Corse, and raised $6.5 million for the museum, a tick higher than the $6.4 million raised in 2024. Celebrity guests included Cindy Crawford, Cynthia Erivo, and Paris Hilton; Doja Cat, a “a boundary-breaking creative force,” according to Chow, performed.
Celmins is perhaps best known for meticulous, photorealistic paintings and drawings of the ocean, the sky, the moon, and the desert. In a review of her retrospective at the Fondazione Beyeler last year, the writer noted that Celmins’s subdued, desaturated artworks “speak quietly but insistently to fundamental human desires: to connect, to see, and to understand.”
In a statement, LACMA director and CEO Michael Govan connected Celmins’s blend of realism and imagination with Villeneuve’s contemplative and cerebral films. Villeneuve directed and produced the Dune trilogy (part three comes out in December), and is set to direct the next James Bond movie,
The 2026 gala is the museum’s first since the opening of the controversial and long-awaited David Geffen Galleries. The 110,000-square-foot one-story building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, came with a price tag of $724 million and opened to the public in May.
