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Party Coverage: Scene City

By MONICA CORCORAN HAREL

LOS ANGELES — At the Hammer Museum’s 15th annual garden gala, the name on everyone’s lips was one that nobody wanted to utter aloud.

“At our table, we’re trying not to talk about Harvey Weinstein,” said Selma Blair, chatting with the artist and filmmaker Liz Goldwyn before dinner. “It’s overload and it’s sickening.”

“It’s not just Hollywood,” Ms. Goldwyn said. “There are offenders in fashion and corporate America, too. This is only the beginning.”

The event has an uncanny sense of timing. A year ago, this lively fund-raiser for more than 500 guests took place just 24 hours after the release of the recording of Donald J. Trump’s vulgar comments about women. And really, who could talk of anything else?

Now, another powerful man was in the headlines, for allegations of sexual abuse. (Though Mr. Weinstein was a presence on the city’s gala circuit, he never attended the Hammer event).

This year’s honorees, the Oscar-nominated director Ava DuVernay and the New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als, didn’t mention Mr. Weinstein by name but they didn’t have to.

Mr. Als, a recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, joked of the honor that “it was better than getting a call” from the MacArthur Foundation, before going into a Homerian tale of a masculine monster who tries to oppress minorities.

Ms. DuVernay took a different tack and said she wouldn’t focus on men “who develop and dwell in the dark, dangerous places that make the world unsafe for so many women.” Instead, she spoke of the “good guys” and named her father as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the boyish uber-producer J. J. Abrams.

“I tried to play it cool, but shockingly I don’t do that very well,” Mr. Abrams said, recalling the first time he met Ms. DuVernay at a party. “Despite my best efforts, I think I probably came off a little scary.”

In between speeches and courses catered by Suzanne Goin, guests including Sarah Jessica Parker, Hailey Baldwin and Jessica Lange (all of them dressed by the fashion sponsor, Bottega Veneta) table-hopped in the museum’s atrium or took in the Hammer’s current exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985.”

For Emmy Rossum and her new husband, Sam Esmail (creator of the TV series “Mr. Robot”), the museum setting conjured romance. “We got married at the Guggenheim,” Ms. Rossum said, and mentioned that the couple received a few pieces of art as wedding gifts. “But we didn’t get a Kandinsky!” she said with a laugh.

The band Haim — three waifish sisters from Los Angeles — closed the evening with a performance. Beforehand, they joked about how their mother, a former art teacher, helped nurture their creativity.

“She did all of our art projects when we were kids, so everyone thought we were brilliant artists,” Alana Haim said.

“Ugh. Even my handwriting is chicken scratch,” said her sister Danielle.

Perhaps, the sisters, too, were addressing what was on everyone’s mind when they closed the evening with a soulful rendition of Tom Petty’s power anthem “I Won’t Back Down.”