RELATED: Photos from the Lincoln Center Institute gala

Lincoln Center Institute brings workshops to schools to stimulate children’s imaginations with theater, dance, music, and art.

At its gala Tuesday at Cipriani 42nd Street, the institute demonstrated its methods by stimulating adult imaginations with a Beach Boys performance and beach-themed props at the dinner tables: sunglasses, suntan lotion, pineapples. Guests bobbed along to “Barbara Ann” and “Surfin’ USA.” Whitney Topping got pulled onstage to play guitar.

The fun also had a serious side: The event raised $1.5 million and marked the expansion of the institute’s programs during the past five years. The institute’s budget has grown to $7 million from $4 million, with plans to increase to $9 million–$10 million, the executive director of the institute, Scott Noppe-Brandon, said. His book about the importance of imagination in the workplace is scheduled for publication by Jossey-Bass in the winter of 2009.

The event honored the chairwoman of the institute, Susan Rudin, and her husband, Jack, for “their commitment to one another, to Lincoln Center Institute, and to New York City,” the president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Reynold Levy, said at the podium.

In accepting the Mark Schubart Award in Education, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Ellen Futter, read a passage by Rachel Carson that captured perfectly the mission of Lincoln Center Institute. Carson wrote, “If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

agordon@nysun.com