2026 Gala: A Woman Has No Place in the Art World

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About Our Honorees

Louise Bourgeois is one of the most influential artists of the past century. Though she worked in several mediums throughout her 70-year career—including performance, painting, and printmaking—she is best known as a sculptor. Using the body as a primary form, she explored the full range of the human condition, with a focus on themes of guilt, abandonment, love, and reparation.

Raised in Paris and its suburbs, she was involved in her family’s tapestry restoration workshop from a young age. In 1938, she moved to New York and began taking classes at the Art Students League. Her first solo show took place in 1945, and her first retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1982. She was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French minister of culture in 1983. Other honors include the Grand Prix National de Sculpture from the French government in 1991; the National Medal of Arts in 1997; and the French medal of Commander of the Legion of Honor in 2008. She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1993, and in 1999 was awarded the Biennale’s Golden Lion. Her work has been the subject of major international exhibitions, including those organized by Tate Modern, London; the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Recent shows have been in on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Belvedere Museum, Vienna; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; and Posten Moderne, Trondheim, Norway.

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Deborah Kass enrolled at the Art Students League in 1966, at the age of fourteen. She received her BFA in Painting at Carnegie Mellon University, and later studied in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Kass’s work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self.  Kass uses the technique of appropriation to present critical commentary on power relations, identity politics, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world. Kass's work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Jewish Museum (New York); Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Cincinnati Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; Fogg Museum, Harvard Art Museums; and Weatherspoon Museum, among others. In 2012, Kass's work was the subject of amid-career retrospective Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, PA. Since 2011, OY/YO has been a reoccurring motif in Deborah Kass's work in the form of paintings, prints, and tabletop sculptures. In 2015, the Two Trees Public Art commission presented a monumentally scaled OY/YO along the iconic Brooklyn waterfront. A large edition of OY/YO was acquired by the Jewish Museum in New York in 2017. Monumental editions are permanently installed in front of the Brooklyn Museum since 2018, the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University since 2020, and the Weitzman Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia in 2021. The 2026 Art Students League Gala was inspired, in part, by Kass’s After Louise Bourgeois, a 2010 sculpture that pays tribute to the French-American artist and consists of a spiraling neon light that reads “A woman has no place in the art world unless she proves over and over again that she won’t be eliminated.”

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Christine Mack is a New York–based art collector and philanthropist, and the founder of the Mack Art Foundation (MAF), a Brooklyn-based residency program supporting emerging artists from around the world. Born in the Philippines and raised in Stockholm, she moved to New York to attend Parsons School of Design, where she studied Graphic Design and Advertising. After an early career in design, including roles at Hearst Publications and running her own design firm, she shifted her focus to art, collecting, and philanthropy.

Through MAF, she provides artists with studio space, housing, and mentorship, fostering collaboration and community engagement across New York. The foundation also offers scholarships and awards, and is launching the Art Hub, a three-month studio program for New York–based artists centered on exhibitions, public programming, and building connections with collectors, gallerists, and mentors.

Christine serves on the boards and committees of the Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and is a dedicated advocate for children’s mental health. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Aspen Art Fair. In 2025, she received the Champion of the Arts Award at the Southampton Arts Center, where her collection was exhibited, and was presented with a proclamation from the Mayor in recognition of her contributions.

Christine lives with her husband and three sons in New York City.