THE YOUNG FELLOWS BALL

March · The Frick Collection, New York · An Evening · Since 2000 · The Ball

Arranged by the Court

Guests in black tie before the flower wall and Young Fellows Ball sign at The Frick Collection, New York — I · Before the Flower Wall

Dates: The 2027 dates are to follow
WhereThe Frick Collection, New York
DressBlack tie
AdmissionOpen to the public
The weatherIn March New York reaches about 50°F by day and 36°F at night, and rain or snow falls on about one day in three.
The tableThe Court dines beforehand at Daniel, 60 East 65th Street, New York (danielnyc.com).
In companyA member who means to go says so to the Secretary, and the Court seats its members together where the engagement allows.RSVP tells the Secretary that a member means to attend. Send passes the engagement’s name, its date and the address of its page to whomever the reader chooses, or, on a computer, copies the address; the Court itself sends and keeps nothing.RSVP

The Young Fellows Ball is one evening in March at the Frick, given by the museum’s supporters under forty-five and attended by about five hundred of them.

It runs from half past eight until midnight, the galleries stay open, and people dance in a house holding three Vermeers.

The House

The Frick is not a museum that acquired a building. It is a house that became a museum.

Henry Clay Frick built it on Fifth Avenue before the first war, filled it with what he had spent thirty years buying, and left instructions that after his wife’s death it should open to the public. It did, in 1935.

Which means the pictures hang where he put them, in rooms scaled for living rather than for viewing. In the Living Hall, Holbein’s portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell face each other across a fireplace with El Greco’s Saint Jerome between them. The two men destroyed one another, and they have been looking at each other across that room for ninety years.

The house closed for several years for a renovation and reopened in April 2025, with the second floor, the family’s own rooms, accessible for the first time.

The Fellows

The Young Fellows are the Frick’s supporters between twenty-one and forty-five. The group exists to keep an institution of that age supplied with people who are not.

The ball has been given since 2000 and raises around half a million dollars, which goes to the museum’s education programme and to the research library that serves students across the five boroughs.

It is themed each year, generally to whatever exhibition is hanging, and the room takes the theme seriously. A Gainsborough show produces eighteenth-century silk. A porcelain flower installation produces guests in flowers.

Guests in gowns and black tie gathered for a curator’s talk before a Turner in the green West Gallery at The Young Fellows Ball, The Frick Collection, New York — II · The West Gallery

What to Know

It sells out. Tickets have gone within a day of opening, and the only reliable way in is to be a Young Fellow, which requires joining rather than knowing somebody.

The Frick publishes no dress code; the Court wears black tie, and the room dresses past it. This is the New York evening where costume and black tie meet, and the people who commit are the ones photographed.

The galleries stay open all night. Most guests spend the evening in two rooms and never reach the Vermeers, which are three of the thirty-odd that exist anywhere in the world.

Half past eight to midnight is short for a ball and it is meant to be. Everyone goes on somewhere afterwards.

Questions

When is the Young Fellows Ball in 2027?

The 2027 date is to follow. The Frick gave the 2026 ball on Thursday 12 March, from 8.30 pm to midnight, with the theme Travel Through Time, and the 2026 event sold out.

How do you get tickets to the Frick Young Fellows Ball?

Through membership. As of October 2026, the Frick lists the Young Fellow level at $750 a year, for ages 21 to 39, and among its benefits the opportunity to purchase tickets to the ball. The Frick does not publish the ticket price.

Who are the Frick Young Fellows?

They are the Frick’s members at the Young Fellow levels, from Young Fellow, for ages 21 to 39, to Sustaining Young Fellow, for ages 21 to 45. Members receive events and programmes of their own and an invitation for two to the Spring Garden Party; the higher levels may serve on the ball’s Benefit Committee.

Guests seated beneath a Turner canvas at The Young Fellows Ball, the black-tie evening in the Frick’s galleries in New York — III · Beneath the Turner

The Court

The Young Fellows Ball is not the Court’s own. Places, tables and Young Fellow membership are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the evening: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterwards. It sells within a day, so a member who wants it should say so in the autumn.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.