Anna's Adventures in Wonderland

In recent years, 28-year-old painter Anna Weyant has found herself at the center of the art world circus thanks to soaring demand for her paintings, a surge in her auction prices, and a relationship with her gallerist, Larry Gagosian. When you cut through all the noise and hype, who is Weyant, and what's at the heart of her work?

- By Carrie Battan. Photographs by Roe Ethridge

One Day in LATE OCTOBER, the painter Anna Weyant took a friend with her to shop for a coat to wear to LACMA's annual Art + Film Gala. Even by the contemporary art world's extravagant standards, this gala creates a uniquely powerful blizzard of money, glamour, and prestige by bringing together just the right blend of Hollywood celebrity and adjacent art world royalty-which is to say, heavy on the Hollywood. For the evening, Dolce & Gabbana dressed the 28-year-old Weyant in a sheer black mesh dress, floor-length and dotted with crystals. A pair of black satin high-rise panties and a matching plunge bra would be plainly visible underneath. With this ensemble, her butter blond coif, and delicately contoured features, Weyant would, perhaps, look more like a young actress than a humble New York painter.

Now she needed a matching overcoat. Weyant summoned her friend to the changing room to give her opinion on her selections. She wore the dress underneath to get a sense of how the pieces would jibe. "My friend opened the door to the room, and she goes: Absolutely not. You cannot wear that to LACMA," Weyant tells me, about a week after the gala. "And I was like, 'Oh, I'm wearing it. It's the coat I want your opinion on-not the dress."