Kevin Beasley held the award in one hand and hugged Thelma Golden with the other. The embrace at the podium, caught mid-laugh, was the night in miniature: the Studio Museum in Harlem handing its Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize to an artist it had raised, in front of more than 700 people who had come to mark the museum’s first year in its new home on 125th Street.
The annual gala, held Monday, October 26, at The Glasshouse on 12th Avenue, raised $4 million for the museum’s exhibitions, programs, scholarship and public outreach. The evening honored Raymond J. McGuire, the board chairman who steered the museum through the campaign to build that home and who now holds the title Chair Emeritus. It also put the two constituencies the building was built for in the same room: the artists, and the people who pay for the art.
McGuire has served on the board for 25 years, most of them as chairman, a tenure that spanned the capital campaign and the seven years the museum’s galleries were dark while the new building rose. Golden, the museum’s Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator, told the room his leadership had driven “the ambitious campaign to build our new home on 125th Street,” and she credited his “extraordinary stewardship, strategic vision, and deep devotion to our mission” with securing the museum’s impact “for generations to come.”
Kathryn C. Chenault, who succeeded McGuire as chair of the board, used her remarks to remember Gordon J. Davis, a trustee who had supported the museum, in her words, “through nearly every chapter of our journey.” She described the mission in plain terms: to remain “the sanctuary for Black art and culture.” For a room accustomed to gala speeches, the pause for Davis gave the evening its gravity.
Beasley’s prize carries its own lineage. George Wein, the jazz impresario behind the Newport festivals, established the Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize in 2006 in memory of his wife, Joyce Alexander, a longtime Studio Museum trustee who died in 2005. The past winners read as a syllabus of contemporary Black art: Simone Leigh, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, Derrick Adams, Toyin Ojih Odutola. Beasley first came to the museum as an artist in residence in 2013 and 2014, and he returned on Monday as the honoree. His work binds sculpture to sound, garments hardened in resin and speakers built into the pieces themselves, and it has filled rooms at the Whitney Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2025 he opened PROSCENIUM, a monumental installation across Tippet’s Field at Storm King Art Center. Next month he takes a sound installation, made with Ralph Lemon, to Kunsthaus Zürich.
The room made the argument for the building. Mayor Zohran Mamdani attended with First Lady Rama Duwaji, herself an artist, in a rare joint appearance on the city’s social calendar. Around them were artists Amy Sherald, Carrie Mae Weems, Rashid Johnson, Julie Mehretu, Mickalene Thomas, Tyler Mitchell, Dawoud Bey, Sanford Biggers and Deborah Willis, filmmakers Spike Lee and Tonya Lewis Lee, television host Star Jones and news anchor Deborah Roberts. Three peer museum directors came as guests: Michael Govan of LACMA, Scott Rothkopf of the Whitney and Anne Pasternak of the Brooklyn Museum. Lafayette Square and HarbourView Equity were the lead corporate sponsors, and the seated dinner, by Vogue’s account of the evening, ran to shaved Brussels sprouts and miso-glazed cod.
The museum has stood on its stretch of 125th Street since 1979, but the building that opened on November 15, 2025, designed by Adjaye Associates with Corgan as executive architect, is the first one built for it: 82,000 square feet of galleries, studios and education space for an institution founded above a liquor store in 1968. The proceeds from Monday night keep its exhibitions, its residency program and its school programs funded for the year ahead. On November 15, the building turns one.
The Social Register’s event directory tracks the season’s galas, benefits, and society evenings. Plan your next evening there.
