RxArt

The artist-mobilizing nonprofit RxArt hosted its annual PARTY! last night, a silent auction-driven evening of artists, designers, and other celebrities uniting to sip cocktails and eat hors-d'oeuvres for the sake of bringing much-needed artwork to the sterility of children's hospitals. The event, thrown by RxArt founder Diane Brown in conjunction with cosmetics line Chanel Beauté for 2011, has been a big draw for artists since its inception in 2000, and last night was no exception.

ARTINFO ran into Bill Powers, who, with fashion designer wife Cynthia Rowley, has been a member of RxArt's board for the last five years. He gave us sneak preview of this year's "Between the Lines" coloring book, the star-studded artist collaboration the organization hands out to young hospital patients. "Look at Rob's panda glitter stickers!" he said, opening the book to Rob Pruitt's metallic spread. Pruitt's artwork, an image of overlapping zebras reportedly colored in shades of Chanel lipstick, also graced the cover.

Artist KAWS chatted with us a bit about his current projects, which involve going to Texas. He didn't contribute to this year's coloring book as he did last year. "It was just timing really," he explained. "Right now I'm working on the Fort Worth museum exhibition in December, just a solo show at the Modern Art Museum. But we're doing some projects with hospitals in L.A. and New York. I love Diane Brown. She's a special lady."

While guests sipped cocktails and used Chanel markers to color in a black and white mural echoing Pruitt's cover art, others were locked in a fierce bidding war in the silent auction.

"It's great to have Aggy Gund here," Powers told us, referring to philanthropist and power art collector Agnes Gund. She was a tough competitor for several pieces, including April Gornik's "Light in the Woods," a piece from the coloring book. Gund put in four bids before another bidder closed the auction at $1,400. She also put up a valiant fight for an untitled David Hammons piece, a vague outline of what appears to be Buddha seated before the sun, several times outbidding Powers, but ultimately losing to artist Aaron Young, who brought it home for $3,600. Ruthie Friedlander, Olivia Kim, and Terry Richardson were locked in a three-way battle for Ryan Foerster's "Untitled (Fucked Up Horse)," but Richardson came out on top for $2,400. 

The artwork up for auction had various levels of child-friendliness: Lizzi Bougatsos's 2009 "Hey Jack (don't worry I won't embarrass you)" featured a Norman Rockwell-like firefighter shaking hands with Mickey Mouse, who happened to have a full three-dimensional erection bursting forth from the piece. Miranda July, in a not surprisingly quirky and adorable fashion, contributed "Begging," a pull-down curtain scrawled with the words "If this shade is down, I'm begging your forgiveness on bended knee with tears streaming down my face." It went for $700.

Yoko Ono contributed a piece of her "Promise" mural, which was originally a seven-foot-tall jigsaw puzzle of wispy clouds adrift a bright blue sky that she debuted at the United Nations Headquarters in 2009. "Promise Piece II," a single puzzle piece out of a set of 67, brought in $1,900 for the cause. Intense bidding went on for Aurel Schmidt's "Crap Butterflies," images of colorfully winged insects with cigarettes for bodies on singed paper. Pages of bids were placed before the winning $6,500 was put down. And the largest taker of the evening was Nate Lowman's "Reverse Snowman Holding His Own Head," a 2011 alkyd on canvas pointilist image of melancholy mounds of snow, which sold for $24,000. 

James Franco, who co-hosted last year's fete with Richardson, was absent from this year's festivities, but his artwork was present. The actor-turned-artist contributed six pieces to the auction, a series of Polaroids of lounging friends, parties, and seemingly random musings — newspaper ads, posters, and a shot of himself taking a picture on a disposable camera — framed in sets of five. "Asheville #2" sold for the starting bid of $8,000, while at night's end, the bidding pages for Asheville #1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 remained blank.