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The Gordon Parks Foundation’s 20th Anniversary Gala Made the Argument for Art as Activism

Pharrell Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, Colin Kaepernick, Derrick Adams, John Legend and Alicia Keys joined other cultural heavyweights who turned out to celebrate the organization's 20 years and raise a record-breaking $3 million.

The Gordon Parks Foundation has spent two decades making the case that creativity is among the most powerful tools in the fight for social justice, and the organization’s 20th anniversary gala at Cipriani 42nd Street was a testament to that. The electric evening raised a record-breaking $3 million—including $1.2 million from a lively auction of Parks’s photographs led by star auctioneer Kimberly Pirtle—to fund the fellowships, prizes and scholarships that will carry Parks’s ideals into the next generation.

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Kicking off the night, Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., whose grandfather Philip Kunhardt co-founded the Foundation alongside Parks, said that the photographer “left........

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