For one photograph at The Pierre on Wednesday night, Michael Govan stood in front of a portrait of himself roughly four times his size, smiling, while Thelma Golden helped him hold the clear glass award. It was the evening in miniature: the American Federation of Arts honoring the people who decide what art the country gets to see, in front of pictures of the people who decide what art the country gets to see.
The federation presented its 2026 Cultural Leadership Awards on October 28 at its annual gala at The Pierre in New York. The honorees were Estrellita B. Brodsky, the curator, collector and philanthropist who has spent three decades moving Latin American art into the center of major museums; Govan, the chief executive and Wallis Annenberg Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Hank Willis Thomas, the Brooklyn artist whose work asks viewers to notice who framed the picture they are looking at. Proceeds from the evening support the research, development and touring of AFA exhibitions, which have carried more than 3,500 exhibitions into museums in every state since the federation was founded in 1909.
Pauline Forlenza, the AFA’s director and CEO, put the selection plainly. “Each of them, in their own way, has changed how people encounter and understand art: making it more open, more urgent, and more alive for the audiences who experience it,” she said.
Brodsky’s case rests on placement. An art historian with a doctorate from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, she has endowed curatorial positions at the Met, MoMA, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and the Hirshhorn, chaired the Hirshhorn’s board, co-chaired El Museo del Barrio, and in 2015 founded ANOTHER SPACE, her foundation’s program for Latin American art. “I have been committed to bringing greater visibility to artists and perspectives that have too often been overlooked, particularly from Latin America and its diaspora,” she said Wednesday.
Govan has run LACMA since 2006. Under him the museum has added more than 46,000 works to its permanent collection, more than doubled its annual attendance to over one million visitors, and this year opened a new permanent collection building designed by Peter Zumthor. His remarks turned the honor outward, toward the regional museums the AFA supplies. “Sharing art with regional communities is one of our highest priorities at LACMA,” he said. “Year after year, the American Federation of Arts has been doing that beautifully on a national scale.”
Thomas, 50, is the youngest of the three and the only working artist. His public works include The Embrace on Boston Common, the memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, and REACH at O’Hare International Airport. He co-founded For Freedoms, the artist-led group that treats billboards and public space as civic media, and he holds the Guggenheim Fellowship and the U.S. Department of State Medal of Arts. “When art is out in the world, it belongs to everyone, and I find that humbling,” he said. “All of my work is about framing and context, and about how, depending on where you’re standing, it really shapes your perspective of the truth.”
The gala leadership listed by the federation included Elizabeth Belfer, Martha MacMillan, Anne E. McCollum, Barbara and Richard S. Lane, Ellen and Bill Taubman, and Alice Walton, herself a past recipient of the award. Earlier honorees include Howardena Pindell, Wangechi Mutu, Frank Gehry, Marina Abramović, Eli and Edythe Broad and Kehinde Wiley, a roll that maps closely onto who has held power in American art. The federation works with more than 100 museum partners, among them the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, and its touring exhibitions reach millions of visitors a year. The AFA has not announced a fundraising total for the evening.
The number is usually the point of a gala story. Here the point is distribution. Art mostly stays where it is collected, in a handful of wealthy cities, and for 117 years the AFA has packed up exhibitions and sent them to museums whose visitors would otherwise never stand in front of the originals. Thomas, accepting his award a few feet from his own enlarged face, gave the mission its shortest version: “In bringing art to audiences across the country and internationally for nearly 120 years, the American Federation of Arts has played a transformative role in fostering connection and deeper understanding.”
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