Creative Capital is excited to announce its inaugural Artist Benefit + Banquet, which will take place on Tuesday, September 20, 2022 in New York City. Christine Kuan, President and Executive Director said, “We are thrilled to be celebrating wild, irreverent creators at a time when the world needs transformative ideas. This banquet will be a feast for the senses—overflowing with abundance and generosity for artists.”

Visionary artists and leaders will be celebrated, representing the range of Creative Capital project grants for artists: Lorraine O’Grady (2015 Creative Capital Grantee) for her pioneering performance, conceptual and Black feminist art; Guadalupe Maravilla (2016 Creative Capital Grantee) for his exceptional work with undocumented immigrant communities and healing; Larissa FastHorse (2019 Creative Capital Grantee), the first female Indigenous playwright to have a play on Broadway, for her community-engaged plays built upon radical inclusion with Indigenous tribes; and JiaJia Fei for amplifying artists’ voices and founding the first digital agency for art.

Benefit guests will enjoy spirited cocktails and contemporary Northern Chinese cuisine in the jewel-box dining room of Hutong, New York. A centrepiece of the evening will be a performance by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Du Yun (2022 Creative Capital Grantee) and her experimental band, Ok Miss, followed by a dance party with music by Oscar Nñ of Papi Juice. Bespoke fragrance art made by Brazilian-born multimedia artist Josely Carvalho (2000 Creative Capital Grantee), in partnership with Ananse Química LTDA and Givaudan do Brasil, will be gifted to all benefit guests. Marcela Guerrero, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, James Schamus, Elena Soboleva and Job Piston will make toasts and personal tributes to the honorees.

All proceeds from the event will support critical grant funding for groundbreaking artists.

Benefit Hosts 
Jane Brown, Reggie and Aliya Browne, Isa Catto and Daniel Shaw, Joseph V. Melillo, and Catharine R. Stimpson

Benefit Committee 

Champions
Isa Catto and Daniel Shaw

Leaders
Jane Brown, The Linda Genereux and Timur Galen Family Fund, Reggie and Aliya Browne, and Stephen Reily and Emily Bingham

Creator Committee
Agnes Gund, Annie Han, Bayeté Ross Smith, Bernard Lumpkin and Carmine Boccuzzi, Catharine R. Stimpson, Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, Colleen Keegan, The Muriel Pollia Foundation, David and Michele Yokell, Dorothy Tapper Goldman, Edgar Arceneaux, Elaine Goldman, Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, Jae Rhim Lee, James Schamus, Josely Carvalho, Joseph V. Melillo, Kathleen O’Grady, Legacy Russell, Lyda Kuth, Marquise Stillwell, Matthew Moore and Carrie Marill, Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, Ruby Lerner, Sam Van Aken, Sanford Biggers, Sarah Meyohas, Shelley Fox Aarons and Philip Aarons and Sunny Bates

Individual dinner tickets to the Creative Capital Artist Benefit + Banquet are $1,500 per person, with tables starting at $10,000. The event has a very limited capacity. For tickets or additional information, visit creative-capital.org/benefit or contact [email protected].

Lorraine O’Grady (Photo Credit: Ross Collab)

About Lorraine O’Grady
Lorraine O’Grady is an interdisciplinary artist, living in New York City, and born and raised in Boston to Jamaican immigrant parents. O’Grady mines such topics as diaspora, hybridity, and Black female subjectivity through performance, photo and video installation, and writing. Driven by the need to fully discover her own identity and to clarify its meaning to others, O’Grady established herself as an active voice in New York’s alternative art scene by the early 1980s while volunteering at the Black avant-garde gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM). There she produced much of her “signature” work, including her first performance Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (1980–83). Since then, she has continued critically reflecting on race, class, and social identity, calling out the classism and racial apartheid endemic in the mainstream art world. O’Grady’s practice utilizes the diptych—or at least the idea of the diptych—as both a tool for institutional critique and a conceptual framework to interrogate Western society. By insisting on a both/and framework and forwarding “miscegenated thinking,” O’Grady has developed a unique critical perspective on the art world and a trailblazing approach toward artmaking.

Guadalupe Maravilla (Photo Credit: Emmanuel Sanchez Monsalve)

About Guadalupe Maravilla
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer currently based in Brooklyn, New York. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and in 2016 he adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to the undocumented and cancer communities. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. Additionally, Maravilla has performed and presented his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and many more.

Larissa FastHorse (Photo Credit: Connor Horgan)

About Larissa FastHorse
Larissa FastHorse will be the first female, Indigenous playwright to have a play produced on Broadway. She is a Sicangu Lakota playwright, director, and choreographer, living in Santa Monica, California. FastHorse’s work radically engages Indigenous collaborators to explore onstage representations of the joys and challenges that the Native community faces. Her latest comedy, The Thanksgiving Play, is a hilarious and poignant play that touches upon weighty issues such as privilege, representation, and appropriation, but never loses its sense of humor. FastHorse won the PEN USA Literary Award for Drama, NEA Distinguished New Play Grant, Joe Dowling Annaghmakerrig Fellowship Award, AATE Distinguished Play Award, Sundance/Ford Foundation Fellowship, Aurand Harris Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, the UCLA Native American Woman of the Year and the Ford, Mellon, and NEA Grants. She is a proud officer of the Board of Directors for Playwright’s Horizons.

JiaJia Fei (Photo Credit: Andy Boyle)

About JiaJia Fei
JiaJia Fei is a digital strategist, based in Brooklyn, New York and working at the intersection of art, culture, and technology. As founder of the first digital agency for art, she is consulted by museums, galleries, and artists to tell their stories online. From 2016–2020, she served as the first Director of Digital at The Jewish Museum in New York. From 2010–2015, she served as Associate Director of Digital Marketing at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Fei received her Bachelor of Arts degree in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and has lectured on the impact of art and technology worldwide.

Du Yun (Photo Credit: Zhang Hai)

About Du Yun
Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theater, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world. Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. Her collaborative opera Sweet Land with Raven Chacon (for The Industry) was the 2021 Best New Opera by the North America Critics Association. Four of her feature studio albums were named The New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of the Year, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively.

Josely Carvalho (Photo Credit: João Caldas)

About Josely Carvalho
Josely Carvalho is a multimedia artist, born in São Paulo, Brazil and maintains studios in Rio de Janeiro and New York. In the last four decades, her artwork has embraced several mediums and sought to highlight memory, identity, women’s issues, and social justice while consistently challenging frontiers between artist and public and art and politics. Her work can be found in several museum’s collections as Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, MoMA, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, among others. One of her public works is Memorial Armênia at the Armenia subway station in São Paulo. Her archives are included in the Smithsonian American Art Archives. Carvalho has received numerous awards, most recently including her second Pollock Krasner Foundation Award for 2022–23.

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