The Museum of Modern Art’s annual Party in the Garden benefit sold out once again, with 650 guests showing up for dinner and another 1,400 patrons arriving for the after-party on Tuesday night. For the third year in a row, sponsor Cartier helped to underwrite the event. This year’s event honored Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City of New York, along with artists Cindy Sherman and Ellsworth Kelly, who was celebrating his 90th birthday.
Before heading into the museum for the seated dinner, guests, including Anna Wintour, Rachel Roy, and Jeff Koons, entered from 54th Street into the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden for the tented cocktail reception. This year, the event decor had a modern, tropical vibe—a theme that was underscored by the evening's heavy humidity.
Inside the lobby and atrium, the museum’s planning team delivered a streamlined, modern affair that showcased exotic, lush greenery and pops of neon against a stark white background. In lieu of hiring an outside event designer, the museum tapped its own assistant director of special events, Tania Abitbol, to handle the decor and production. "The museum hired Tania last fall to be our in-house designer," said Maggie Lyko, MoMA's director of special events and affiliate programs. "Something we always try to do with the party is bring the garden inside, but we gave it a new twist this year with a more modern, neon tropical look."
The production team built a platform to raise the museum’s normally tiered lobby and covered it with wall-to-wall white Astroturf carpeting. Slabs of neon green Lucite seemed to glow atop the clear rectangular dinner tables. Potted plants in green ceramic vases served as minimalist centerpieces, and clear Victoria Ghost chairs provided by Taylor Creative Inc. added a modern edge to the look. Overhead, dense arrangements of tropical plants were suspended between white pillars, creating a jungle-like canopy effect.
After-party guests began streaming into the sculpture garden around 9 p.m., where lighting company Bentley Meeker Lighting & Staging set the tone with colorful, graphic lighting projections. Buzzy band Fun hit the stage, which was lined with green neon tubes and foliage, at 10:30 p.m. to give an energetic performance that included crowd-pleasing hits like “We Are Young” and “Carry On." As in years past, a V.I.P. lounge was set up on the fifth-floor terrace overlooking the garden.
With individual dinner tickets beginning at $2,500 and tables ranging from $25,000 to $100,000, and after-party tickets starting from $200, the affair brought in more than $4.1 million to benefit the museum and its programs.
