Jet Set

Last Thursday, fractional jet ownership company NetJets hosted a two-part event celebrating the buzzed-about Jeff Koons exhibition launch at the Museum of Contemporary Art for current and potential clients. Produced by Sandra Gibson and Patrick Vega, the company's vice president of events and events manager, respectively, and MCA manager of individual giving Kaitlin Allen, the evening began with a cocktail party at the museum and culminated in a dinner with the artist at the MCA Warehouse.

Some 200 guests—including top MCA donors and board members and local art enthusiasts—attended, providing NetJets with an ideal audience of potential clients. "Many of our clients are art collectors who use NetJets as their way of travel," Gibson explained, adding that NetJets' comprehensive events program has offered clients everything from film screenings to Hannah Montana concerts in the past.The challenge of the evening was to transform the raw, industrial MCA Warehouse space into an environment that "honored the artist, but wasn't too gimmicky," Vega said. "We wanted to make the space colorful and soften it up, but we wanted to keep it sophisticated, contemporary, and sleek." To bring color to the space, Event Creative illuminated the warehouse's exposed-brick walls with pink and amber lights. At each dinner table, vases filled with peonies, hot pink roses, and ginger and green hydrangeas sat atop illuminated Lucite boxes. (Highboys scattered throughout the buffet area were also made of lit-up Lucite and topped with floral arrangements.)

For dinner, J&L Catering provided themed food stations offering everything from sushi to mashed potatoes. The buffet-style format of the meal (and lack of assigned seating) was meant to encourage discussion amongst guests: "We wanted this to be festive; not a formal, sit-down dinner," said Vega. "We wanted the dinner to have the same environment as an art opening, where people engage with each other and come and go as they please."

According to Vega, some of Koons's work (such as his giant aluminum bunny) represents "looking at the world through a child's eye and seeing the beauty in a naive point of view." Inspired by this whimsical aesthetic, the dessert table offered cupcakes topped with cheery, pastel-hued frosting and ice cream dipped in dark chocolate and drizzled with green chocolate (to give a painterly effect), while the bar served the evening's signature cocktail, an electric-blue blend of vodka and lemonade rimmed with Pop Rocks—a playful allusion to Koons's pop-artist pedigree.

Apart from a brief speech from NetJets regional vice president John Odegard, who welcomed guests to the dinner, the company created a presence at the dinner through the use of gobos (which lined the hallway of the MCA Warehouse), branded cocktail napkins, and logoed gift bags filled with branded baseball caps, journals, and pens.