St. Vincent Performed in a Room Filled With Artists at the 2024 MOCA Gala

Art galas are not normally events where one dances on a table. But most art galas do not feature electrifying performances from virtuosic musician and rock star St. Vincent, born Annie Clark. Last night at the 2024 MOCA Gala, presented by Bulgari and held at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Downtown Los Angeles, Clark climbed on top of a table to sing (or shriek) a song from her forthcoming album, All Born Screaming, and the crowd howled in return.

“All Born Screaming is actually a title that I’ve had since I was 22,” Clark, clad in a classic Bulgari Serpenti necklace, told Vogue. “I knew I was going to make a record or write a song or something called All Born Screaming, but I hadn't lived enough life to really earn it. But now I've seen a lot more.” The record does indeed feature some literal screaming, but Clark prefers to think of it as something that goes from “pummeling to ecstatic mantra.” At MOCA, she performed a medley from ABS, along with a spine-tingling cover of the Portishead classic “Glory Box.”

Clark is an avid art lover—she collectss the work of Donald Mitchell, collaborates with Alex Da Corte, and cites Kazimir Malevich, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola in a list of favorites. “One of my favorite things about art and artists is that people will find a way to create no matter what,” she said. “I saw the most beautiful thing I've ever seen at this gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland, from this woman who was institutionalized but who managed to make the most beautiful wedding dress out of spit and toilet paper. And I just find it incredibly inspiring that artists, creators are going to create.”

MOCA, the only artist-founded museum in Los Angeles, aims to have artists do just that. “Artists really found the need almost 50 years ago for a space where they and their audiences could come,” MOCA executive director Johanna Burton told Vogue. “And now we have amazing museums all over town, but this is still the one I think that people think of when they think of an artist-centered, artist-driven institution.”

For this year’s gala, Burton collaborated with Los Angeles-based artist Max Hooper Schneider, who created a series of sculptures and site-specific installations for the party titled World Without End. Schneider’s alchemic, kaleidoscopic work imagines detritus from the present as it might be found in the future—one such sculpture, “Tide Piepool,” consists of a tidepool-like collectsion of neon-colored sea life and trash (“I make worlds in boxes,” Hooper Schneider told Vogue. “So I kind of conceive of a pie shell as another world in a box, a container”). The MOCA Gala dinner of chicken pot pie was coordinated to be on theme.

“Everything I do is imagining speculative situations of things that come out of a collapsed environment,” said Hooper Schneider. “I imagine this is something that could come out of a future landfill or something like that. But you have to kind of brace your thinking for a larger timescale, meaning that something may seem disastrous upfront, but then a hundred or 200 years from now, maybe it's something more miraculous and hopeful. So I think of my work as radically hopeful in that sense, and not dystopian.”

In addition to Hooper Schneider’s sculptures and installation (an eerie phosphorescent crater), guests at the gala—including Keanu Reeves and girlfriend Alexandra Grant, Ava DuVernay, Kenny Scharf, Jordan Wolfson, and Catherine Opie—could take in two current MOCA exhibitions, Paul Pfeiffer’s Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom and MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. After the St. Vincent performance, everyone headed to the museum lobby and courtyard for an after-party, featuring DJ sets from Kilo Kish and Kitty Ka$h. The crater continued to glow.