Beaux Arts Ball 2026: Home Sweet Home

Home is where the heart is, or so it is said. But in 2026, home is where lots of other stuff is too: spying doorbells, estranged relatives, back-to-back virtual meetings, through-the-roof utility bills. Some go home; others are sent there. Home can feel as much a shelter for retirement assets as one for retiring bodies. Traditionally a place of refuge, home is now a numbing distraction—more streaming channel than nurturing hearth. For those who are lucky enough to have one, home is something that demands protection. For many others, the privilege of something to protect is put further and further out of reach—often by increasingly lethal means. 

For Beaux Arts Ball 2026: Home Sweet Home, the League will lodge at the Andrew Freedman Home, a Bronx institution that has witnessed the many complexities and contradictions of home over its century of operation. Established in 1924 on the Grand Concourse by magnate Andrew Freedman, who feared the loss of his fortune and creature comforts, the home preserved the day’s reigning social hierarchy by providing free housing to down-and-out, formerly wealthy residents. After bearing many identities over the ensuing years, today’s Andrew Freedman Home is a reimagined community hub for the Bronx that houses interdisciplinary residencies, incubator programs, artisan workforce development, child and senior care, and other vital local resources that would perhaps be unrecognizable to those who once called the place home. The event will feature an original commissioned installation by TAKK, directed by Mireia Luzárraga and Alejandro Muiño, lighting designed by Joel Fitzpatrick Studio, sound by DJs Bojaq and Madre Guia, and a graphic identity designed by Eddie Opara and his studio at Pentagram.

Sweet, saccharine, or bittersweet? The tropes and traumas of home weigh oppressively on collective imaginations. There’s no place like it, after all. But what organizing is possible in this most public of private spaces? Histories are at once remembered and repurposed. For every depleted battery, there’s a grid to plug in. Just as families can be rearranged, so too can rooms. In 2026, has the woolly sweater of domestic life been pulled over our eyes? Or is the picket fence a design tool knowingly up for grabs? Homesteader, homebody, homewrecker? Who’s at the door?