Out & About

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The New York Sun

DIKER PAVILION FOR NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES

‘It’s a knockout, one of the most beautiful contemporary rooms in New York City,” the co-chairman of the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, Charles Diker, said.

He may be biased on the subject: Mr. Diker was speaking of the new Diker Pavilion for Native Arts and Cultures, which he and his wife, Valerie, supported with a $1 million contribution. It was created through a $5 million renovation of raw space in the U.S. Customs House. The new gallery and performance space opened Wednesday night at a gala dinner honoring Mr. Diker and his wife. Guests’ expressions seemed to confirm Mr. Diker’s opinion of the pavilion, with special attention lavished on the cherry wood finishes, the curved walls, and the display cases.

It is here at the New York outpost of the Smithsonian Museum that the Dikers have chosen to give expression to their passion for Native American art, having founded the Heye Center’s board 10 years ago. “We emphasize the aesthetic beauty of Native American art, as opposed to the ethnography,” Mr. Diker said. “Art has its own continuum. Native American art comes in different shapes and forms. It is a private, personal art that engages the spirit of both the person producing it and the viewer.”

Mr. Diker had not seen the pavilion in its completed form until the night of the event. “I couldn’t expect anything more and I’m kind of fussy,” he said.

The work of enhancing the center is far from complete for the director of the Heye Center, John Haworth. “There’s a lot I’m looking forward to down the road,” Mr. Haworth said. “In a few years we’ll have a dazzling object-rich exhibition based on the permanent collection.”

Mr. Haworth has high hopes for Lower Manhattan in general. “What I hope is that this becomes the must-visit historic district in the entire country,” he said. “Here you can see remarkable architecture and authentic American history,” he said, noting the museum’s proximity to Ellis Island, Federal Hall, and Battery Park.

Margot Ernst, Valerie Rowe, and Paul Critchlow were the chairmen of the celebration, which raised $1.6 million for a permanent endowment for education programs.

COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island is a remarkable place just 35 miles outside the city, and this fall it will start feeling even closer as it forges scientific and fund-raising connections here.

With a $100 million grant from the Starr Foundation announced yesterday, the laboratory will become a member of the Starr Cancer Consortium, joining three New York City institutions — Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College — and the Cambridge, Mass.-based Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The consortium’s goal is to “assure maximum efficiency and the greatest firepower in targeting cancer,” the chairman of the foundation, Maurice Greenberg, said.

The laboratory is also courting New York donors at its first Double Helix Medals fundraising dinner, on November 9 at the Mandarin Oriental. The medal for humanitarianism will go to Muhammad Ali. Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, a cancer researcher, will receive the science medal, and NBC’s chief Bob Wright and his wife, Suzanne, will receive a medal for corporate leadership.

“We’ve already raised over a million dollars for this event, and an anonymous donor is going to match our profits, so we think this is going to be a $2 million event. It all goes for genetics research at the lab,” the lab’s director of development, Diane Fagiola, said.

No serious New York City fund-raising event would be complete without a cocktail party beforehand to introduce new friends to the cause. On Wednesday night, a social group came together at Doubles to meet the lab’s president, Bruce Stillman, and its chancellor, the Nobel laureate James Watson.

The institution includes a graduate school and a program for undergraduate research, but the budget shows where the priorities are: $70 million of the $100 million annual budget goes to research. Six new laboratory buildings will be built through a $200 million capital campaign, of which $130 million has been raised. This drives home what anyone who has ever met Mr. Watson and Mr. Stillman know well: They are hard men to turn down.


The New York Sun

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