For the past two years, Sotheby’s has hosted benefit auctions to raise money for the Ali Forney Center, a nonprofit organization in New York that aims to protect LGBTQ+ youth from homelessness. This year, art adviser Stephen Truax, a former director at Cheim & Read who helped organized last year’s auction, is partnering with David Zwirner Gallery on a similar endeavor, with proceeds again benefiting Ali Forney’s 24-hour, 365-day drop-in center. The community center provides housing, meals, healthcare, and career training to queer youth.

The exhibition, titled “Toward the Light: Artists for the Ali Forney Center,” opens Tuesday evening at David Zwirner’s 19th Street space and will be on view through Saturday, November 1. Compared to the previous iterations at Sotheby’s—which each included six artworks by six artists—“Toward the Light” is much more robust. Truax and his collaborators at the gallery gathered 41 artworks by 38 contemporary artists. (Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, and Roberto Gil de Montes contributed two works each.)

“We brought in well over a million dollars in material consignments,” Truax told ARTnews, noting that the exhibition’s affiliation with Zwirner this year attracted “high-level artists who believe in the project and wanted to participate.”

A handful of the partici...