When Prince Harry took the microphone at a fundraiser for his charity Sentebale on Wednesday night, he acknowledged that the basement room of a Lower East Side art gallery wasn’t his usual haunt. Still, he thanked the gallery’s owner, Ki Smith, for giving him a crash course in contemporary art.

“I am slightly new to the art world, so I’m not going to pretend as though I know something that I don’t,” the prince said. “But what I do know is the ability for art to be able to convene and bring people together, and that is needed now more than ever in today’s world.”

Smith assembled a crowd that included journalist Ronan Farrow, artists Rakuko Naito and Jorge Luis Rodriguez, and Harriet McGurk, Frank Stella’s widow, for “Friend,” an exhibit featuring works by minimalist and op-art greats including Stella, Agnes Martin, Smith’s grandfather Tadaaki Kuwayama, and Bridget Riley. The show’s sales will benefit Sentebale, and the event was intended to introduce the art set to the organization’s work across southern Africa.

In an onstage conversation, Sentebale board chair Sophie Chandauka said that when Harry first visited Lesotho on a gap year in the early 2000s, the AIDS epidemic had wrought economic and social devastation in the country. “Ninety percent of the population was either too old, too young, or too sick to work, and this was in a population of about 2 million people,” she told the crowd. “So you can imagine what a devastating impact HIV and AIDS had in Lesotho.”

In 2006, Harry founded Sentebale with Prince Seeiso, the younger brother of the country’s current leader, King Letsie III, to raise funds for the communities he worked with during that first trip. Nearly two decades later, biomedical advances and international assistance have changed the country—but southern Africa’s youth are still facing tough odds. In response, Chandauka said, Sentebale has shifted its strategy toward providing holistic support through “health and wealth” programs.

For years, Sentebale cultivated supporters in Africa, the United Kingdom, and Europe, but when Harry moved to the US in 2020, the nonprofit found a new audience. “We knew that there was now this amazing opportunity for us to create a community that would support the work in the United States, but we really didn’t know how we would go about doing it,” Chandauka said, adding that they made a special round of outreach at the charity’s annual polo tournament in Miami this April. And in September, Chandauka said, Smith joined Harry and a group of about 10 philanthropists on a visit to Lesotho to see the “responsive and agile” organization in action.

On their first night, Chandauka told Vanity Fair, the organization was getting ready for a panel discussion between Harry and Seeiso when a sudden blackout across Maseru, the capital city, threw a wrench in their plans. They decided to take the event outdoors.

“We were all literally sitting there as you would in the traditional village, with the fire in the middle,” she said. The bonfire event ultimately became a free-flowing conversation that included youth from the charity’s Let Youth Lead program, its local workers, and the visitors.

Smith said that night reminded him of his own introduction to the business of art as a teenager. “One of the things that first really touched me about Sentebale was youth entrepreneurship. That’s the whole deal,” Smith said onstage. “I got kicked out of school when I was 16 and my parents said, ‘get a job or go back to school.’ So I wasn’t going to go back to school! I walked around the neighborhood and I walked into a gallery. Art has always been what’s given back to me. To have moments, now that I’m in art, where I can give back to others is really important.”

By the end of their trip this past fall, Smith had a proposal for Harry and the organization, and the planning for a sale began. In his remarks, Prince Harry mentioned that he was especially impressed by how Smith had turned his idea in Lesotho into a fundraiser in the span of two months. “We are deeply grateful to Ki for curating this remarkable exhibition and for traveling with us to Lesotho and South Africa in October to witness firsthand the impact of Sentebale’s work,” he said. “You and your team have been an absolute joy to work with.”