Men in black tie and women in glittery gowns crossed the crowded sidewalk on Fifth Avenue, climbed the grand staircase lined with white candles and headed past the twin stone lions into the New York Public Library, where waiters served Prosecco and passed hors d’oeuvres in the lobby. Some 320 guests then filed down another staircase into a rose-hued, marble-walled private dining room with a domed glass ceiling supported by gilded pillars. Huge round tables topped with lemon sprigs and candles filled the space. A video screen hung behind a stage. I lived in New York for 20 years and didn’t even know this room existed. The event was the 2024 annual fundraising gala and award ceremony of the American Academy in Rome, the 130-year-old cultural institution that awards the prestigious Rome Prize to about 30 of the nation’s leading artists, writers and scholars each year. The Rome Prize grants winners five- to 11-month residential fellowships, plus stipend, in order to work, connect and be inspired at the academy’s compound high up on Rome’s Janiculum Hill. Others come as residents throughout the year.
At IP, we cover trends in philanthropy and funding, including current efforts to democratize and diversify giving. We’ve written about giving circles and a new-ish online tech tool to help them run called Grapevine, new nonprofit start-up supports, such as the fiscal sponsor Social Impact Fund, and community-led grantmaking, like that of Brooklyn Org (formerly Brooklyn Community Foundation). In the midst of all this important innovation, the glitzy fundraising gala can seem like an anachronistic relic from another era, and one that’s increasingly inappropriate, given today’s anticolonial ethos and massive inequality.
And yet, the glitzy gala persists, especially in New York.
As a journalist who is not a regular on the gala circuit, I was excited to be invited to the AAR event. Just sitting on a bench watching all the dresses go by felt like a glamorous change from hunching over a laptop in yoga pants at the coffee shop. But the event also raised a question worth asking: Is the glitzy gala still a valuable fundraising activity, or has it become a tone-deaf endeavor and waste of resources?
I came away feeling that for some organizations, a fancy, social affair serves the institution and its cause in several key ways that a hot new tech app simply cannot. For AAR, the annual gala creates a reliable way for fellows and residents to stay connected to each other and to a high-point experience in their lives, amplify the community and its values, and support future and past Rome Prize winners. Oh, and it also raises serious money.
Spending money to make money… on one-bite cheesecakes and a D.J.?
AAR was chartered by an act of Congress in 1905, but the idea for a national academy in Rome was forged by France in 1666 with the creation of the Prix de Rome. The vision is this: A nation’s cultural leaders should have a chance to step away from the stressors of their daily lives to spend time thinking and working among the relics of the ancient world — then, newly inspired, bring their learning home. Some three-dozen countries have similar institutions in Rome, but unlike AAR, most are funded by the government. AAR, on the other hand, operates almost entirely thanks to private philanthropy, and its endowment does not cover its annual budget. As Peter Miller, AAR’s president, said last year, “This is utopia. We’re fundraising for this dream that has been realized.”
AAR’s overseas location makes fundraising in the U.S. particularly challenging. As costs for everything from food to housekeeping grow, expenses continue to rise.
Still, there are plenty of reasons to doubt the value of wining and dining for charity. A gala can feel like “Bridgerton” in a time when so many people are lacking funds for basic survival. (Oxfam has sought to bring that point home by offering a “toolkit for hosting an Oxfam Hunger Banquet Event” designed to “bring hunger and poverty issues to life” by randomly assigning guests to one of three tiers: A sumptuous feast, a simple meal or a dinner of plain rice and water.) While galas raise money, they also cost a lot to host, and they eat up staff time in the planning. Social-climbing attendees might purchase tables or tickets to buy a seat among the wealthy and connected, or to brandish their company and impress clients. At worst, galas can become an end in themselves, a waystation on the social calendar of those in a certain echelon, or aspiring to it.
All that being said, the gala can work on multiple levels — as last Thursday’s event made clear — such as by powerfully reinforcing the impact and visibility of the organization holding it, while also filling its coffers.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
Raising money and fostering connection
Tables at the AAR gala ranged in price from $15,000 to $100,000, while single tickets went for $1,500 to $5,000 — donor’s choice. Previous Rome Prize winners could purchase discounted seats. About 100 additional guests attended an afterparty only, with dancing, drinks and dessert and a ticket price of $100.
The event also raised money through a live auction held during the sit-down dinner. Auctioneer Lydia Fenet stood on stage in a metallic gown and drummed up $170,000 from diners for experiences such as a guided tour of Pompeii, a studio visit with 2017 AAR resident, pianist, composer and multimedia artist Jason Moran and a one-night stay at a vineyard in the countryside outside Rome; and through a “paddle raise,” which consisted of asking attendees to donate at the $10,000 level, and then at lower amounts. Trustee Slobodan Randjelović then added another $100,000 match to the paddle raise. All told, the evening raised $1,150,000 and counting, as of this writing, which is a little more than last year’s gross.
As in other years, AAR invited the most recent cohort of fellows to attend the whole evening for free. Including recent fellows is also part of a long-term funding and community strategy. While early funders included Gilded Age magnates like J.P. Morgan, William K. Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller Jr. and others, many donors today are former Rome Prize winners and their heirs. The line between fellow or resident and donor is somewhat fluid. The gala kicked off with a short introduction by Calvin Tsao of the Tsao Family Foundation. The Tsao foundation gave nearly $5 million to AAR in 2022; Tsao is the current chair of AAR’s board of trustees and was a 2010 AAR fellow. Gala Co-Chair Mary Margaret Jones was a 1998 fellow and two-time resident.
Kristi Cheramie, a professor and the head of landscape architecture at The Ohio State University and a 2017 AAR fellow, flew in for the gala with her husband, William. In addition to the $2,000 they spent for their seats, they donated another $1,000 at the gala in the paddle raise and “were glad to do it,” she said. “We have about six to 10 from my cohort of fellows that regularly show up and have for about seven years. It’s an important touchpoint for us. It means a lot. We use the gala as an excuse. No matter where we are in the U.S., we come back for the gala and we have the weekend to get together in New York.”
William Cheramie went to Rome as a so-called “fellow traveler,” the term AAR uses for partners of fellows who accompany them on their stay. The gala, he said, was “like a different kind of high school reunion, but you’re a grown-ass adult. It’s a midlife bonding experience.”
For an artist, attending a gala can be part of supporting one’s career. Zachary Fabri, a 40-something visual artist who lives in Brooklyn, was one of last year’s fellows invited to attend for free. He said this kind of social event can help artists nurture the broader network they need to survive. “I’m very aware of the ecosystem of the arts. Artists have to make the work, then they need somewhere to show it, which involves relationships with curators and galleries,” he said. “They need that larger landscape of support.”
For Fabri, being invited felt like AAR recognizing him as part of the ongoing community: “They’re saying, ‘Here’s a literal seat at the table.’ The table I was at, which costs I don’t know what — that’s real estate in that room. The fact that they carved out that real estate for us meant they weren’t making money on that table. It’s very generous, and it makes sense. The academy is a community. Alumni are an important part of that. They place a lot of importance on alumni.”
The Cheramies both said that the AAR development team’s efforts make a difference to them. “They’ll call us after and ask how it was,” said Kristi. “I feel like they’re interested to know a fellow’s experience versus a pure donor. I appreciate that.”
The gala as value reinforcer
The evening definitely had the feeling of old friends and like-minded strangers gathering in support of a shared vision. Another big part of the AAR gala program was the presentation of the Centennial Medal to three established cultural leaders, an annual acknowledgment begun in 1994. After Centennial Medal award winner and Italian historian Carlo Ginsberg spoke, I watched as people got up from the tables to stretch, find old friends and stand around drinking and talking.
Centennial Medal winner Terence Blanchard, a Grammy-award-winning composer, talked about how AAR supports the confidence of artists, helping them believe that anything is possible, which, as he put it, makes creativity possible. Artists grapple with limited resources, he said, and the most important thing is “to help these artists develop art that will challenge us.” His was a personal, moving pitch for the importance of the arts and of arts funding. It reiterated the AAR premise that supporting artists matters. Blanchard also led a performance of two pieces of opera he had composed.
Centennial Medal winner Jenny Holzer, the conceptual visual artist known for illuminated electronic displays of words and large-scale projections of pithy phrases in blocky letters, took the stage. As she read her speech about how to respond to the outcome of the presidential election, I realized that she is a poet, something I had missed staring at her word art in museums. For me, being present at the gala enhanced my understanding of her art. As with Blanchard, her speech was an example of how a social event like a gala is a cultural activity in and of itself.
Fabri said he has attended a handful of galas over the course of his career, usually as a guest but also, during career highs, as a donor. He bought a ticket to the 2016 gala for Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, a Maine-based residency program that has an active alumni support system. “They’ve given back to me a lot, so when I had money, I bought my own ticket to support this organization that supported me,” he said. He’d just received a $20,000 grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation at the time. “I started to think about what it is to be the recipient of support, the tiers of giving, and also, can we have a different understanding of who can be a philanthropist? I always thought it was like the Ford Foundation and people like that. But that year, I started to look more closely at fundraising mailers and to think about them. I was like, ‘Oh, philanthropy starts at any level.’ I could pay for the gala that year, and it felt good to do it.”
On Thursday night, I stayed until the very end, dancing with the afterparty fellows. A recent fellow in town from Los Angeles asked the DJ for his business card with an eye toward planning another party and inviting artists from her Rome Prize cohort to attend. One gala, $1 million, and one more chance to reinforce the sense of community for artists who spend much of their time creating alone.
