As LGBTQ+-focused organisations across the US face critical funding challenges due to the federal government’s relentless cuts and a rightward shift in philanthropy, the Ali Forney Center (AFC) is holding a benefit exhibition at David Zwirner’s location on West 19th Street in Manhattan’s Chelsea gallery district. The AFC was founded in 2002 in honour of the eponymous queer 22-year-old who was murdered on the street in Harlem after being disowned by their parents. This year the organisation is facing a drop in funding of more than $400,000 from the loss of corporate sponsors alone.
The benefit show, organised for the second year by the art adviser Stephen Truax, aims to ease the AFC’s financial struggles through the sale of 38 works by a wide range of artists including sought-after younger queer painters like Doron Langberg, Jenna Gribbon, Jake Grewal, Ilana Savdie and Anthony Cudahy. The exhibition, Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center (28 October-1 November) also features works by pioneering figures like Wolfgang Tillmans, Julie Mehretu, Katherine Bradford, Jim Hodges, Ross Bleckner and Roberto Gil de Montes.
Jenna Gribbon, Among the nipply blooms, 2025 © Jenna Gribbon. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
“The public attacks on LGBTQ people and their rights across the country can make us feel powerless,” Truax tells The Art Newspaper. “Toward the Light offers an optimistic alternative. Artists can come together and make a real difference for marginalised LGBTQ young people.” He considers projects like this fundraiser “more essential now than ever before”.
Langberg initiated the benefit to support AFC in 2023 with an online group show hosted by Sotheby’s that raised more than $350,000 in support of the organisation’s housing and care efforts for more than 2,000 queer youth. “AFC is an incredibly necessary resource and the best way to fundraise for it could be through art,” says Langberg, who contributed Avi and Pete (2025), a painting of two sitters on Fire Island, to this year’s show.
Nicolas Party, Portrait, 2025 © Nicolas Party. Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth
Last year’s second edition of the benefit sale, also with Sotheby’s, featured eight artists including Salman Toor and Chris Martin, raising more than $370,000. More than two thirds of the artists participating in this year’s edition will donate 100% of the proceeds to AFC; this is the first edition of the fundraiser to have a physical show. Occupying David Zwirner’s West 19th Street location, the exhibition benefits from its host’s blue-chip muscle and starry artist roster. The exhibition includes works by Marlene Dumas, James Welling, Arlene Schechet, Jenny Holzer, Stanley Whitney, Laure Simmons, Nicolas Party, Joe Bradley and Sean Scully.
Dumas’s piercing piezograpohic print and graphite portrait of Alan Turing from 2015 and Gil de Montes’s lush wash of a blossoming visage in against swirling abstract lines (1996) bridge pains of queer history with a needed dash of reverie. Whether fleshy—as in Tillmans’s photograph Karl, Utoquai 2 (2012)—or abstracted—likeLiz Nielsen’s rainbow-hued chromogenic photogram of three rocks, Bold Stone Stack (2023)—the human body looms large across the presentation.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Karl, Utoquai 2, 2012 Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; and Maureen Paley, London
Truax is optimistic about the art sector’s commitment to supporting and safeguarding its queer community, especially after the success of the two previous shows and given David Zwirner’s support.
“The work of queer artists was on the sidelines when I first moved to New York, and it is now centred on the global stage,” he says. “We are seeing a much wider range of voices participating in contemporary art and its market today.”
- Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center, 28 October-1 November, David Zwirner, New York
