During Miami Art Week—which seems to become ever more crowded each December—The Cultivist and Capital One’s experiential pop-ups have become some of the hottest tickets in town. The members’ club for art enthusiasts and the bank (which recently staged a dollhouse-themed installation by Anna Weyant and Marc Jacobs in New York) brought an Alex Israel-produced frozen yogurt shop to Miami Beach in 2023, and last year, Moroccan artist Hassan Hajjaj created a kaleidoscopic tea salon, both of them activated with fine dining and musical performances.
For 2025, artist, director, and screenwriter Alex Prager transported audiences to her native Los Angeles in a sprawling immersive installation, characteristic of her uncanny oeuvre. Called the Mirage Factory (a reference to author Gary Krist’s 2018 book of the same name), the two-day public pop-up was a “visual poem,” Prager tells Vogue, honoring the magic, mystery, myths, and tribulations LA’s singular identity is built upon.
The project found its serendipitously perfect site at 430 Lincoln Road, a quick walk from Art Basel Miami Beach. The building formerly housed the famous Beach Theatre, which opened in 1940 and screened first-run films from major Hollywood studios. Naturally, that history enriched Prager’s ode to Hollywood’s Golden Age, and her interest in the lines between artifice and reality. “The moment you cross the movie theater, you’re committed to magic and the suspension of disbelief,” says Prager.
When The Cultivist and Capital One approached Prager earlier this year, the artist, who was born and raised in LA, had just lived through the wildfires, which devastated her family’s Palisades community. While much of her practice contends with the grit behind the city’s glamour, she knew instantly that “being able to create such a big installation about something that’s so meaningful was a great opportunity.” Known for her cinematic “world-building,” where every detail, from the eerie unnatural lighting to the conspicuous wigs, is meticulously considered, Prager is no stranger to large sets. The Mirage Factory, however, was by far the most expansive installation of hers that the public could physically encounter.
The work was no typical Hollywood love letter. “I’m really attracted to the darker underbelly of Los Angeles. The corruption and the madness of the city has always existed and is very much born out of that notion of the Wild West—that feeling that anything is possible, bad or good,” says the artist, referring both to the city’s opportunities for stardom and its “ever-present” natural disasters. In an ongoing deep dive into Los Angeles’s lore and history, through Krist’s writing and people like Joan Didion’s, Prager realized how LA’s distinctive energy has always hinged upon its endless cycle of highs and lows, its promises and pitfalls. After all, “it was never supposed to be a city,” she says. At the turn of the 20th century, it didn’t even have its own water supply. “Los Angeles as we know it only exists by sheer will,” she says.
The installation began with an artificial orange grove, a nod to Los Angeles’s key industry before films moved from New York to the West Coast. The following room featured a 1:12-scale reimagined version of Hollywood Boulevard, created with leading miniature maker and long-time Prager collaborator Christopher Warren, of the family-owned company Blind Beagle. (He was one of more than 100 artisans who brought the Mirage Factory to life.) Iconic Hollywood haunts like Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Walk of Fame meet Musso Frank’s (Prager’s favorite restaurant, where she takes her studio to celebrate major projects with martinis) and less expected spots. There are also Easter eggs: Several of Prager’s works were shrunken down into billboards, for example, and a mini Arby’s alludes to the time when Prager had her purse stolen at the restaurant chain, but was able to negotiate with the teenage thieves to recover it.
As visitors listened to a soundtrack sampling everything from movie lines to coyote howls and the Santa Ana winds, they moved on to a room sheathed in green fabric—a reference to green screens—while a pool and striped lawn furniture represented Prager’s dream backyard. Elsewhere, an alcove was outfitted with a baby-pink 1957 Porsche Speedster, and at the gift shop, proceeds from sweatshirts, caps, and more went to Heal the Bay, an environmental nonprofit that safeguards the Greater Los Angeles coastal waters.
On December 3, the green space was transformed into a surrealist dining room, where guests including Shay Mitchell, Evan Ross, Stefano Tonchi, and Es Devlin (whose 50-foot illuminated library was recently installed in Miami Beach) for The Cultivist’s and Capital One’s main event. The night began with the reveal of a new photograph, Beverly Palms Hotel (a reference to the fictionalized accommodation in I Love Lucy), featuring a bird’s eye view of black-tie-clad guests, who appear to mingle on a pink carpet. “On the surface there’s community and celebration, but then when you look a little closer, there’s no real interactions taking place,” explains Prager. Like many of Prager’s images, the densely populated work doubles as a game of I Spy, the initial high-gloss veneer giving way to garish prosthetics and out-of-place details—all of which were mirrored in a runway-style performance where actors recreated the portrait before dinner guests.
Continuing the Los Angeles spirit, guests enjoyed a meal crafted by James Beard Award-winning chef Dave Beran of Santa Monica mainstays, Pasjoli and Sélène (Beran also trained the actors in The Bear). Between local ingredient-starring dishes, such as celery root with beets and savory granola, and a fruit tart with fermented chiles and fig leaf, Diana Ross treated guests to several of her greatest solo and The Supremes hits, including “I’m Coming Out,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and a disco-fied rendition of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Between the disco doyenne’s red sequined gown, flawless performance, and Prager’s video of the Griffith Observatory over a glittering Los Angeles, the evening’s star power was entirely real in, perhaps, a first for Prager: no tricks, all treats.