From Monet Pastels to LEGO Lilies, the Grand Gala Ball Packs the MFAH

Hayden and David McGuiness (photo by Wilson Parish)

By Jeff Gremillion

Fall for Color lived up to its name at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where more than 275 guests moved from Monet pastels into an Ai Weiwei riot of brick and bloom.

The 2026 Grand Gala Ball, chaired by Polly and Murry Bowden, filled the Caroline Wiess Law Building on Friday, Sept. 25, and raised more than $2 million for the museum’s operating budget through table and ticket sales. The theme took its cue from Ai Weiwei’s “Water Lilies #4,” on view in the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building: a 650,000-brick riff on Monet’s water lily triptych, built in 22 colors and mounted on aluminum.

Guests arrived through a pale-blue tent hung with blue and purple hydrangeas, then moved into a cocktail reception of soft florals and light-green draping. The Dallas String Quartet played electric strings while the room was still in Monet’s palette. Between the staircases to dinner, an eight-foot floral wall of succulents, hydrangeas, roses, proteas, anthuriums and ranunculus marked the turn into Ai Weiwei’s colors.

The Events Company set the dining room in jewel-toned linens and warm reds, oranges and pinks, under a glass chandelier shaped like a water lily. The Big Beyond played through the night. Bastion Events cooked the gala menu for the first time: chilled corn velouté with crab, paprika oil and crouton; slow-cooked sea bass with beurre blanc, broccolini and artichokes; and a chocolate-orange petit gâteau with milk chocolate mousse, orange segments, crème anglaise and a chocolate sablé.

Premier underwriters were Polly and Murry Bowden, the Hildebrand Fund, Nancy and Rich Kinder, and the Schnitzer family. Grand underwriters included Cherie and Jim Flores, Lynne and Joe Hudson, the Jan and J. Venn Leeds Grand Gala Ball Operating Endowment, Fayez Sarofim & Co., and Susan D. Sarofim.

Guests included Nancy and Rich Kinder, Franci Neely, Joan Schnitzer, Margaret Alkek Williams, Janet Gurwitch and Ron Franklin, Leigh and Reggie Smith, Lily and Johnathan Schnitzer, and Dan and Kristen Zimmerman.

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