MOCA Gala 2026 honors Kara Walker and Paul McCarthy

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles hosted its annual gala over the weekend, bringing art world and Hollywood royalty to Little Tokyo — from Barbara Kruger and Charles Gaines to Ava DuVernay and Keanu Reeves. It was the second year that the gala took on the “Moca Legends” format, which recognizes figures who “cement the museum as a global leader in contemporary art,” per MOCA. This year’s event honored artists Kara Walker and Paul McCarthy, along with MOCA trustee Eugenio López Alonso.

When entering the galleries for cocktail hour on Saturday, guests essentially walked into a small but immersive slice of these artists’ worlds. An installation conceived by the evening’s creative director, artist Piero Golia, celebrated Walker’s seminal “Monuments” commission and McCarthy’s famous “White Snow.” Trees from the “White Snow” project were lit up moodily throughout the space. While a process photograph taken in Walker’s studio — something that was never meant to be seen — showing a diorama of a horse statue maquette hanging with toys and figurines, made in preparation of “Unmanned Drone,” was turned into a vinyl covering one of the back walls. (McCarthy also brought his 1992 sculpture “Dead Viking” to the gala, seating it at his table.)

Hosted by dancer and multi-disciplinary artist Stephen Galloway and soundtracked by live orchestral performances from the MOCA Gala Symphony Orchestra, the gala under Golia’s vision became a whimsical, bordering-on-surrealist invitation to indulge the senses and support the arts in L.A. (The evening would raise $3 million for MOCA.) The dinner menu, dreamed up in collaboration with food artist and designer Laila Gohar, included charred breadsticks in beautiful, weird shapes, reminiscent of McCarthy’s wooden sculptures, and a sculpted mound of butter the height of a taper candle. Wild king salmon topped with tomatoes, olives and capers was accessorized with a puff pastry in the shape of a cartoon fish.

Between remarks by MOCA Board Chair Carolyn Clark Powers and MOCA Interim Maurice Marciano Director Ann Goldstein — who acknowledged the employees from the MOCA Union protesting for fair wages in front of the rideshare dropoff point earlier that evening — the speeches from Walker and McCarthy were the highlight of the night.

After a moving introduction by “Monuments” co-curator and the Brick director Hamza Walker, Kara Walker took the stage. “If my art has been about anything, it’s about me trying to hack through the received histories that still persist in our culture, racist and sexist power dynamics, and the intersection of myth making, spectacle and mass psychosis. It’s an honor to be in an exhibition with the esteemed contemporary artists who are in ‘Monuments’ … It’s also a huge honor to be here tonight and share the ‘legend’ status of Paul McCarthy, who is the real deal and who generally puts us all to shame by using shame itself as a tactic and a weapon at a moment in the United States.”

McCarthy, introduced by fellow artist and MOCA Board of Trustees member Tala Madani, said: “It’s now 60 years, 60 years of making art, 60 years of pushing — always pushing. Pushing myself, pushing everyone around me into a psychological space and also a critical space of the social structure that we live in, the structure that’s really an illusion and we do not know we exist.”

A giant vanilla cake with chocolate ganache was cut in dramatic fashion for the gala’s finale while guests mingled around the space hunting down a slice. The fits came into focus: Alex Israel in a skinny suit. Galloway in head-to-toe Tom Ford. Walker in a voluminous Rachel Comey dress. Other patrons in full Schiaparelli runway looks and Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel.

The gleaming trays of jiggling squares the color of stained glass — artful jello shots, it turned out — that carried the evening out on a high.