An elegant, all-green room, meant to evoke a garden party in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, was the setting for an intimate performance by the one and only Diana Ross. In a glimmering red-and-silver gown, Ross, accompanied by two back-up singers, hit the stage on Wednesday night to “I’m Coming Out,” one of the all-time gay anthems, and the room went wild.
Over the course of a roughly 20-minute set, Ross performed supercuts of some of her biggest hits, ranging from her days with the Supremes like “Baby Love” and “Stop! In the Name Love” to her covers of “I Will Survive” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” Behind her glimmered a looped video of the LA skyline at night. Her energy throughout the performance was unmatched, moving about the stage with grace, and popping open her red feather fan.
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The occasion was a dinner in celebration of Alex Prager’s Mirage Factory, an immersive installation located in the old Beach Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road. Commissioned via a partnership between Capital One and private art club the Cultivist, Mirage Factory presents three distinct slices of Los Angeles history, with the installation’s centerpiece being a 1:12 scale miniature of Hollywood Boulevard.
“I wanted Mirage Factory to be a kind of a visual poem, in a way, about certain movements that happened that were so significant to the city’s creation,” Prager told ARTnews in a recent interview. “It’s a feeling of ‘what if’ that is just ever present—it’s addictive. If you dream big naturally, then you need to dream big there because everything is possible there.”
Ross performed between the first and second courses of a Los Angeles–inspired menu, designed by Dave Beran, who runs Seline and Pasjoli in Santa Monica, California. Prior to dinner, which included a scallop topped with caviar and a short rib dish, guests could munch on a mustard leaf that was dipped in a passionfruit sauce and then dipped into dry ice so it would be almost freeze dried when you bit into the now crunchy leaf. Throughout the night, the drinks were flowing from the martini bar, which included six variations on the classic cocktail—served up, of course.
Earlier in the evening, Prager had staged a performance in which the characters from her 2025 photograph Beverly Palms Hotel, hanging nearby, came to life. After a recording welcoming the attendees to “the Mirage Factory, where dreams are made—and broken” and asking them to take their seats, the characters processed out one by one.
A mustachioed man in a tuxedo comes out with the hotel’s pink telephone; on the phone the caller asks, “What’s your story? What’s your script?” to which he replies, “There is no story—that’s the beauty of it.” An elegantly dressed couple, whose relationship is seemingly on the rocks, comes next. She asks, “What took you so long?” He replies, only somewhat convincingly, “Traffic was a bitch.”
“The movie theater is a shared space with stranger,” Prager said of Mirage Factory’s location. “The moment you cross that threshold, you’re committed to the sense of imagination, magic, and suspension of disbelief. I wanted there to be that threshold that people could cross that meant something.”
With the Beverly Palms Hotel performance and the evening’s highlight, Diana Ross on stage, Prager had brought a slice of Hollywood’s glitz and glamour to South Florida.