The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has announced the date and honorees of its 2015 Art+Film Gala. On Saturday, November 7, notables from the art, film, fashion, and entertainment industries will unite at LACMA to honor artist James Turrell and filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu.

Celebrating its fifth year, the 2015 Art+Film Gala is co-chaired by LACMA trustee Eva Chow and actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who continue to champion the museum’s film initiatives.  

"In only a few years, LACMA's Art+Film Gala has established its reputation for honoring artists and filmmakers whose impact can be felt worldwide and that have particular relevance to Los Angeles, and James Turrell and Alejandro G. Iñárritu certainly fit that bill," said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. "In the last two decades, Iñárritu has displayed a daring and nimble vision for films including Birdman and Babel; his work has rightly garnered the highest of critical acclaim. I have known James Turrell for many years and am honored to have cocurated his recent retrospective, which started at
LACMA and has traveled the world."

Proceeds from the annual Art+Film Gala go toward supporting LACMA’s initiative to make film more central to the museum’s curatorial programming, while also funding LACMA’s broader mission. This includes exhibitions, acquisitions, and educational programming, in addition to screenings that explore the intersection of art and film.

“My work is about space and the light that inhabits it. It is about how you can confront that space and plumb it. It is about your seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking into a fire.” —James Turrell

James Turrell is an internationally acclaimed light and space artist whose work can be found in collections worldwide. Over more than four decades, he has created striking works—employing the sky as his studio, material, and canvas—that play with
perception and the effect of light within a created space. His fascination with the phenomena of light is related to his personal, inward search for mankind’s place in the universe.

Influenced by his Quaker upbringing, which he characterizes as having a “straightforward, strict presentation of the sublime,” Turrell’s art prompts greater selawareness though a similar discipline of silent contemplation, patience, and meditation.

Over the past two decades, Turrell’s work has been recognized in exhibitions in major museums around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); and the Panza di Biumo Collection, Varese, Italy.

Whether harnessing the light at sunset or transforming the glow of a television set into a fluctuating portal, Turrell’s art places viewers in a realm of pure experience. His large-scale, often architectural works incorporate the complex interplay of sky, light, and atmosphere in motion across expanses of ocean, desert, and city. They include his Skyspaces, of which there are over 80 examples worldwide: chambers with an aperture in the ceiling that opens to the sky. The recipient of several prestigious
awards such as the Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, Turrell currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, in order to oversee the completion of his most important work that he began in 1974, a monumental land art project at Roden Crater. The artist has been transforming the extinct volcano in northern Arizona into a naked-eye celestial observatory.

In addition to hosting Turrell’s major retrospective in 2013–14, LACMA also currently has on view Breathing Light, a large Ganzfeld installation by the artist, purchased with funds provided by Kayne Griffin Corcoran and the Kayne Foundation. In the spring of this year, through a gift from Hyundai Motor Company as part of The Hyundai Project: Art + Technology at LACMA, the museum acquired Turrell’s Perceptual Cell work Light Reignfall in honor of LACMA’s 50th anniversary.

For more information visit jamesturrell.com.

For more information about the 2015 Art+Film Gala tickets and table sales, contact

artandfilm@lacma.org or 323 932-5878.