A family affair: Hammer Museum Gala pays tribute to Betye Saar and Darren Star

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Gray skies didn’t prevent L.A.’s arts community from getting fancy in support of the Hammer Museum’s annual Gala in the Garden.Adorned in fur coats, colorful sunglasses and patterned ties, artists and celebrities including Owen Wilson, Rufus Wainwright, Lauren Halsey and Catherine Opie joined to celebrate gala honorees Betye Saar and television writer and producer Darren Star.

The event highlighted how the Westwood-based museum inspires creatives and harnesses community for the city’s artists.Under pink and yellow lights, guests enjoyed cocktails while admiring the museum’s galleries.

Guests, including Los Angles County Museum of Art Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan and the Hammer’s Director Emerita Ann Philbin, reunited with old friends and colleagues, making the event feel like a family affair.All were unified in their admiration of the night’s guests of honor.At 99, Saar is among L.A.’s most esteemed and accomplished living artists.

Her career has spanned more than seven decades, with an early focus on rejecting white feminism and reclaiming the Black female body.Civil rights activist Angela Davis traced the start of the Black women’s movement to the creation of Saar’s 1972 assemblage piece, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” During onstage comments at the gala, Getty Research Institute presidential scholar Sandra Jackson-Dumont discussed the massive impact Saar has had on the art world.

“It measures in the artist who found their voice because you insisted that your voice mattered.It’s in the institutions that shifted because you demanded that they see us,” Jackson-Dumont said while introducing Saar to the stage.

“You take what the world cast aside and breathe spirit into it, insisting that the overlooked can speak, that the discarded can testify, that the everyday can dream.”The event also served as an early celebration for Saa...