Brooke Shields, Naomi Watts, and More Honor Kenny Scharf at this Year’s Tribeca Ball

Under the watchful, mischievous eyes of Kenny Scharf’s unmistakable cartoon graffiti characters, a group of steadfast supporters of The New York Academy of Art gathered on Thursday evening for the school’s annual Tribeca Ball; the annual event raises funds vital for the academy’s programming but also serves as a platform for students to showcase and sell their own artwork.

Traipsing through the maze of 100+ workspaces across four floors during the evening’s cocktail hour—where magnums of Champagne Bollinger were poured with abandon by waiters on stilts festooned in feathers and sequins—were Helena Christensen, Francesca DiMattio, and Naomi Watts. Guests perused the artworks which took form in every imaginable way; everyone had an eye for supporting the newcomers. “There has to be room for more up-in-coming talents always,” Watts told Vogue. "And as many great artists as there are out there, there has to be encouragement for new, emerging ones. It s the same in my business or any art forum. We need artists to tell the stories and now more than ever.”

One artist on hand fueling the younger generations was Kenny Scharf himself, the evening’s honoree, who sported a look from his collaboration with Kim Jones and Dior. “My connection to the school goes way back to the ’70s, and it’s actually why I moved to New York,” Scharf told Vogue. “[Eileen Guggenheim] was a visiting teacher of mine at the University of California Santa Barbara. She was a visiting teacher from New York, and it was a very big lecture hall, maybe 500 kids in there, but she was teaching 20th-century art and we were all wrapped listening to her great story-telling, but basically when she got to the factory-ing and Warhol and all the excitement about the life of an artist, basically I sold my car and moved to New York, 1977.”

Scharf was joined for the evening’s dinner by Brooke Shields, glistening in a patent leather dress and Van Cleef Arpels jewels. "I have been on the board for years and there is just no pretension here, zero pretension, and nobody is trying to be somebody else,” Shields mused. “The talent is all around you.”