Diana Ross took the stage in a glimmering red-and-silver gown at an intimate Miami Art Week dinner, opening with "I'm Coming Out" to a room that erupted. The setting was deliberately lush—an all-green space designed to evoke a garden party, complete with a looped LA skyline glowing behind her. In roughly 20 minutes, she moved through her catalogue with the kind of ease that comes from decades of perfecting a craft: Supremes classics like "Baby Love" and "Stop! In the Name of Love," then into covers like "I Will Survive," her red feather fan punctuating the performance.
The occasion was a dinner celebrating artist Alex Prager's Mirage Factory, an immersive installation that opened in Miami Beach's old Beach Theatre on Lincoln Road during Art Week. The installation is a visual meditation on Los Angeles history—three distinct slices of the city's story, anchored by a 1:12 scale miniature of Hollywood Boulevard. Capital One and the Cultivist, a private art club, commissioned the work.
"I wanted Mirage Factory to be a kind of visual poem about certain movements that happened that were so significant to the city's creation," Prager told ARTnews. "It's a feeling of 'what if' that is just ever present—it's addictive."
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Start Your News DetoxBefore Ross performed, Prager staged a performance piece featuring characters from her 2025 photograph Beverly Palms Hotel. A mustachioed man in a tuxedo emerged holding a pink telephone, answering a caller's question about his story with: "There is no story—that's the beauty of it." An elegantly dressed couple followed, their fractured dialogue a snapshot of a relationship on the edge. The whole evening felt designed around that threshold between reality and imagination—the moment you decide to believe in something impossible.
The dinner itself, designed by Dave Beran (who runs Seline and Pasjoli in Santa Monica), leaned into the LA fantasy: scallops topped with caviar, short rib, mustard leaves dipped in passionfruit sauce and then flash-frozen in dry ice. A martini bar offered six variations on the classic. By the time Ross hit that opening note, the room was already primed to suspend disbelief.
