ROSÉ will be the musical guest at LACMA’s 15th Art+Film Gala on Nov. 7, honoring artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Staged for the first time inside Peter Zumthor’s new David Geffen Galleries, the evening marks the gala’s shift from a Hollywood-insider benefit to a global one, with Gucci underwriting the reach for the 15th straight year.
LOS ANGELES — LACMA has named ROSÉ the musical guest at its 15th annual Art+Film Gala, set for Nov. 7 in the museum’s new David Geffen Galleries, where the evening will honor artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. Gucci returns as presenting sponsor, a role it has held since the gala’s inception in 2011; Audi provides transportation and additional support. Pairing a K-pop soloist with more than 10 billion streams to her name with an artist whose graphite drawings can take years to finish is the sharpest statement yet of what LACMA’s benefit has become.
The Honorees
Vija Celmins is the least predictable name the gala has put on an invitation: the Latvian-born artist has spent six decades on a deliberately narrow set of subjects, the surface of the ocean, the floor of the desert, the night sky. The drawings are small and gray, built from thousands of graphite marks, and she has never been a figure the gala circuit could package.
Villeneuve arrives at the opposite end. The director of “Dune,””Blade Runner 2049” and “Arrival” shot his two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel as a single production, and the second film became one of the highest-grossing releases of 2024. LACMA has honored filmmakers of that commercial weight before, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Kathryn Bigelow, and George Lucas, alongside artists such as David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Catherine Opie.
Why ROSÉ, and Why Now
ROSÉ’s résumé is legible to both audiences a museum benefit has to hold at once. As a member of BLACKPINK, she has played the largest venues in pop; as a soloist, the Korean New Zealander has passed 10 billion solo streams, released the album “rosie” and, with Bruno Mars, taken “APT.” to the top of the global charts. The industry crowned that single the best-selling global song of 2025, and it drew three Grammy nominations.
Lei moda work runs alongside it: ambassador roles for global brands and, most recently, an Apple “Shot on iPhone” campaign built around her track “new trick.” LACMA has booked pop before. Past musical guests include Doja Cat, who headlined last year, plus Charli XCX, Elton John, Lenny Kravitz, Annie Lennox, Sting and Stevie Wonder. ROSÉ is the first K-pop artist on that list, and she has already stood in the room, having attended the gala in 2022 and 2023.
The Building in the Background
This is the first Art+Film Gala staged since LACMA opened the David Geffen Galleries on April 19, 2026. Peter Zumthor’s 900-foot building crosses Wilshire Boulevard and places the permanent collection on a single level, with no prescribed route, breaking from the encyclopedic march most museums still follow. The museum counts itself the largest in the western United States, with 155,000 objects spanning 6,000 years.
Fifteen Years of Gucci
Gucci’s presenting sponsorship is now in its 15th year, and it is the gala’s most reliable structural fact. The house signed on for the first edition in 2011 and has not left since. Gucci was founded in Florence in 1921, sits within the Kering group, and today runs under President and CEO Francesca Bellettini and artistic director Demna.
For the house, the arithmetic is not complicated. A museum benefit assembles the collectors, studio executives and talent its Los Angeles clients already move among, on a night when the museum hosts and Gucci dresses the room.
What the Night Pays For
The 14th gala drew nearly 600 guests to honor artist Mary Corse and filmmaker Ryan Coogler and raised $6.5 million, a museum record, with Doja Cat performing. The money is not unrestricted. The proceeds underwrite LACMA’s initiative to make film more central to its curatorial programming, and then to its wider mission: exhibitions, acquisitions, educational programming, and screenings that test where art and film meet.
Two Speeds in One Room
The honorees and the headliner work at opposite tempos, and the program makes no attempt to reconcile them. Celmins is an artist of refusal. She makes her drawings over months, sometimes years, and no photograph in a gala program captures what makes them hold a wall. ROSÉ performs to rooms of tens of thousands, in a form built for scale.
That contrast is the gala’s own design. A museum that wants film treated as art pays for the argument with a night built for amplification, and it accepts that the guest in the loudest category may outshine the two it is actually honoring. That is a real risk for an institution whose product is a permanent collection rather than a performance.
The alternative is worse: a gala that speaks only to the people already inside the building. Fifteen editions in, LACMA no longer has to argue that art and film belong in the same building. It has to argue that the building is worth the ticket, and its answer is to put the widest audience in pop in front of the slowest work in the collection.
