The Gordon Parks Foundation has spent two decades making the case that creativity is among the most powerful tools in the fight for social justice, and the organization’s 20th anniversary gala at Cipriani 42nd Street was a testament to that. The electric evening raised a record-breaking $3 million—including $1.2 million from a lively auction of Parks’s photographs led by star auctioneer Kimberly Pirtle—to fund the fellowships, prizes and scholarships that will carry Parks’s ideals into the next generation.
Kicking off the night, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., whose grandfather Philip Kunhardt co-founded the Foundation alongside Parks, said that the photographer “left clear instructions: ‘Take what I started and carry it into the future’… Gordon knew that art is more potent than violence because it can open our eyes.” He then presented co-chairs Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz with a portrait of Parks by artist and 2018 Foundation Fellow Derrick Adams before acknowledging the foundation’s 2026 Fellows: jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran, artists Sanford Biggers and Amanda Williams, and professor Leigh Raiford.
From there, Pharrell Williams and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times critic-at-large Salamishah Tillet presented the first award of the evening to EGOT-winner, multiplatinum artist and producer John Legend, who closed his remarks by raising his voice in song. Darren Walker, president and chief executive of Anonymous Content, presented to poet, scholar and Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, who asserted that “art is a necessary and courageous act. You cannot quash its force.” Conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas presented an award to Chance the Rapper, while artist, educator and photographer Deana Lawson honored artist Henry Taylor. Last but not least, athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick presented the evening’s final award to Lonnie Ali, who accepted on behalf of the Muhammad Ali Family.
The gala’s program was anchored by music. The evening opened with Chance The Rapper joining the Anthony Morgan Inspirational Choir of Harlem for “I Was A Rock”—a gospel ballad interspersed with soundbites from a 1977 interview in which Ali discussed dedicating his post-retirement life to helping others. Dinner was accompanied by a musical interlude from Dave Guy, trumpet player for The Roots. Gordon Parks’s daughter Leslie Parks Bailey and musician, arranger and composer Mario Sprouse—musical director of three of Parks’s films—then introduced Moran, who offered a moving piano tribute to Muhammad Ali.
All in all, the gala offered, as per usual, a fitting tribute to a man who used his camera as “a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs.” Chance The Rapper may have said it best when he leaned forward at the dais and declared, “The world is on fire, and the greatest defense we have in the world of art is as documentarians. Are we going to be bystanders, or are we going to create the future that we want? Let’s keep fucking shit up.”
