The Artists Ball

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: © NOIR EST BEAU (DOROTHY DANDRIDGE), 2023, © MICKALENE THOMAS (ARTWORK), © CHANAKYA (EMBROIDERY), EVENING STANDARD/HULTON ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES. NOIR EST BEAU (CARRIE MAE WEEMS), 2023, © MICKALENE THOMAS (ARTWORK), © CHANAKYA (EMBROIDERY), © CARRIE MAE WEEMS. NOIR EST BEAU (EARTHA KITT), 2023, © MICKALENE THOMAS (ARTWORK), © CHANAKYA (EMBROIDERY), KENN DUNCAN/© THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY/ART RESOURCE, NY, MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES.

The artists ball

For the first time, and in tribute to Christian Dior’s lifelong affinity for the arts, the Brooklyn Museum’s Brooklyn Artists Ball was held thanks to support from the House.

On Tuesday, April 25^th, 2023, the twelfth edition of the Brooklyn Artists Ball took place in the heart of the Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court. This exceptional event showcased the powerful, manifold ties between Dior, the United States and the world of creation. Symbolically, it echoed Christian Dior’s many passions.

His fondness for fancy balls, for one, which the couturier had cultivated ever since, as a child, he was captivated by the extraordinary costumes that accompanied those magical moments when dreams seemed to become reality. Then there was his appreciation for distant horizons, and particularly America, whose effervescence fascinated him long before he ever crossed the Atlantic, and for which he would develop a deep affection. But above all came his love of art, in all its forms, which forged and fashioned his tastes.

Over the years, Dior has celebrated this unconditional, formative love, which today it perpetuates as the privileged partner of the Brooklyn Artists Ball. This not-to-be-missed annual fundraiser supports the museum’s educational and outreach programs. It also extends the House’s commitment to encouraging various forms of contemporary creation, sealing a bond forged with the Brooklyn Museum in 2020 (notably through a collaboration with Judy Chicago^* on the Dior spring-summer 2020 haute couture show) that was further enriched in 2021, with the retrospective Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams. Having honoured Maria Grazia Chiuri in 2022, the twelfth edition of this unique evening recognized the activist artist Carrie Mae Weems, who is renowned for protean, socially committed works spanning photography, texts, digital imagery, fabrics and video installations. Presented at the group exhibitions Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection (2008) and We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965-1985 (2017), her work returned to the spotlight in March 2023 as part of a manifesto event, A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, featuring intersecting viewpoints by a dozen artists.

^*In the late 1970s, Judy Chicago boldly and poetically asserted her art with The Dinner Party, a monumental installation conceived as a triangular table – seating thirty-nine – resting on a porcelain base inscribed with the names of 999 other legendary female figures. This iconic work representing important women in history has toured the world and is now on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

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Commemorating the fertile connections between art and fashion, Dior and Mickalene Thomas renewed their impassioned dialogue to conceive the scenography for the lobby and the Beaux-Arts Court, where the cocktail party, dinner and ball took place. Under the museum’s majestic glass roof, an enchanting décor appeared, evoking the set the African-American artist designed for the Dior spring-summer 2023 haute couture show, a reinterpretation of Carrie Mae Weems’s Slow Fade to Black series (2010). These paintings were also displayed on dinner tables, punctuated by a profusion of flowers and pieces by Dior Maison.

A multi-creative ode that reaffirmed, more than ever, the essential role of culture.

Art: The House of Dior’s Great Passion

Even before he began sketching his destiny in fashion design, Christian Dior nurtured an unconditional admiration for the arts and the avant-garde. A collector, born aesthete, friend and defender of the twentieth century’s greatest talents, he ran two galleries and exhibited works by Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti, Alexander Calder, Leonor Fini, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. Starting in 1947, that fascination played a key role in the creative process for Dior’s collections, which paid homage to talents he had always admired in silhouettes named Braque or Matisse, for example. The Creative Directors who succeeded the founding couturier have constantly explored that reigning passion through virtuoso inspirations and collaborations that forever associate Dior’s name with the art world.

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