A remarkable cross section of California’s art community — including artists, gallerists, collectors, philanthropists, and museum professionals — turned out en masse on Saturday night at Gemini G.E.L.s Los Angeles location to celebrate and raise money for the William H. Johnson Foundation for the Arts, a nonprofit organization that supports minority artists and awards a prize to one emerging African-American artist each year.

Mark Bradford, fresh off his MacArthur “Genius Grant” win, was on hand to socialize with a group that included quite a few other prizewinning artists. Artist Jennie C. Jones, who was awarded the 2008 Johnson Foundation prize, is now among that set, and she offered her Breathless #15 (2009), a delicate construction made by unspooling a cassette of Kenny Gs 1992 Breathless, for a raffle.

Jones also contributed two works to the charity auction, which featured a Catherine Opie photograph of a high school football player, an Andrea Zittel smock fashioned from an effervescent mix of fabrics, and Sam Durant’s painting End White Supremacy (2009), which seemed aptly titled for the evening’s cause. Pearl Hsiung and Kori Newkirk (a 2004 award winner) were among those artists on hand to watch their work be snapped up in the name of charity. Other artists at the event included Andrea Bowers, Brenna Youngblood, and Edgar Arceneaux, who took home the foundation’s prize in 2006.

Museum professionals from the area also made strong showings. Santa Monica Museum of Art executive director Elsa Longhauser was on hand with her director of development Tracy Mizraki. Bennett Simpson, associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), and Jennifer Arceneaux, MOCA’s director of development, were also in attendance, celebrating the end of an auspicious week: Fundraising numbers are reportedly strong at the beleaguered museum.

Also making an appearance at the gala was artist Ruben Ochoa, who dazzled crowds this summer with his “Collapsed” exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery in New York. The single work on display in SoHo showed an enormous slab of concrete propped against a wall, its position tenuously held by a mound of dirt. Walking nervously under the imposing mass and viewing the work from behind, though, one realized it was perfectly safe: The entire installation was hollow, held comfortably together by a strong network of steel supports.

View the photo gallery above to see who else attended the benefit.