What's New

Nomads and Networks, at the Institute for the Ancient World, is the first US exhibition to present a comprehensive overview of the ancient nomadic culture of Kazakhstan. The objects in the show will come from all  the important museums in Kazakhstan. It challenges the popular perception that nomadic societies were less developed than sedentary ones. The exhibiton will be on display from March 6-June 3, 2012.

Dr. Denise D. Correa, PhD, ABPP-CCNN, Department of Neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College, will present the initial findings of the study, Structural Neuroimaging and Cognitive Functions in Adult Stem Cell Transplant Recipients at the next International Cognition and Cancer Meeting in March.

 Shelby White, shown here in a bucket truck, and Elizabeth B. Moynihan, trustees, and John W. Bernstein, president of the Leon Levy Foundation joined Prospect Park Alliance President Emily Lloyd and Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe for a tour of the progress of the restoration of the Lakeside, December 1, 2011.

On December 19, the Bahamas National Trust hosted a field trip by the Rotaract Club of Eleuthera to the Leon Levy Plant Preserve. The children learned about native plants on the island.

On October 27, 2011, the Preservation League of New York State honored the Leon Levy Foundation and its trustees Shelby White and Elizabeth B. Moynihan for their support of the Arts & Humanities. The Pillar of New York Award is given to individuals and organizations whose work in the field of historic preservation makes them role models for others in the state and nation. See link.

The Fifth Annual Leon Levy Lecture: A Greek Statuary Complex at the Sarapieion at Memphis and the Early Ptolemaic Kings will be delivered by Marianne Bergmann, Director Emeritus, Archaelogisches Institut, Universitat Goettingen, on November 1, 2011.

On September 20, 2011, the  Lower East Side Tenement Museum hosted a ribbon cutting and party to inaugurate the Sadie Samuelson Levy Immigrant Center, named for Leon Levy’s mother. Prior to the ribbon cutting a naturalization swearing in ceremony conducted by Judge Robert Katzmann was held for an honored group of  New York residents as they became American citizens.

In partnership with the Bahamas National Trust, the New York Botanical Garden has created a website for The Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve. The Preserve is home to 171 species of indigenous plants. The website includes photographs of the plants found in the Preserve, information on their uses for bush medicine and other purposes, as well as digital images of Bahamian specimens found in the Garden’s William and Lynda Steere Herbarium.

A new exhibition, Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos opens at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on September 23, 2011 and will be on display until January 8, 2012. The exhibition vividly illustrates the international, pluralistic character of Dura-Europos, a city located high above the Euphrates River, between Syria and Mesopotamia. The exhibition focuses on its final phase, in the third century CE, when Dura-Europos served as an important stronghold on the empire’s eastern edge.

Internationally acclaimed author Hilary Spurling gave the annual Leon Levy Biography Lecture, to a capacity crown at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Sept. 21. Perhaps best known for her award-winning two-volume biography of Henri Matisse, Spurling has also beautifully chronicled the lives of Pearl Buck, Sonia Orwell, and Ivy Compton-Burnett, among others, and is now working on a biography of Anthony Powell, who wrote the landmark twelve-volume cycle of novels called “A Dance to the Music of Time.”

In her lecture, a program of the Leon Levy Center for Biography,  Spurling spoke of her experiences with sources’ memories, especially the need to help them reach back and recover lost memories.

Following a three-year-long conservation project supported by the Leon Levy Foundation, the final section of the rare, thirty-five centuries old Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Goldworker of Amun, Sobekmose will go on long-term view on September 28. It is to join the previously completed sections which have been on view in the Mummy Chamber installation in the Egyptian galleries.

New turtle  hatchlings have been discovered treking through the sand by the mangroves headed towards the point. As Mark Daniels, Preserve Manager, reports, the residents are enjoying their new home at The Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve.

The Leon Levy Visiting Fellowship was created to bring one visiting student already working with archaeological materials to the Institute of Fine Arts Conservation Center for one academic year. It also provides fellowship support to matriculated students seeking a specialization in archaeological conservation. See Link.

On June 7th hundreds of guests celebrated at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Spring Gala.  The Gala raised $650,000 for their educational programs, community out-reach, greening programs and horticultural displays. Shelby White and the Leon Levy Foundation were presented with the Garden’s first Visionary Award for their leadership in New York conservation . See link.

Launching a new kind of learning center for public libraries, the Brooklyn Public Library began work on the Leon Levy Information Commons on June 8. Mayor Bloomberg (at right with Shelby White) and Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz helped celebrate the occasion. The commons, funded by a $3.25 million grant from the Leoon Levy Foundation, will be a comfortable, technology-rich center for learning, training and research.

It will be built in the area of the Central Library now occupied by the popular library, which has begun its move to another part of the building.

The Brooklyn Botanic Gardens announces a $7,500,000 gift from the Leon Levy Foundation. The gift is part of the Garden’s Campaign for the Next Century. It will support such improvements as expanded and restored  gardens as well as better visitor services. The gift is the largest in the instititution’s 100 year history.

In April 7, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded 180 Fellowships to scholars, artists, and scientists in the United States and Canada, chosen almost 3,000 applicants. Details here. The Leon Levy Foundation provides supplemental funding to Fellows with no academic or institutional affiliation.

Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan an exhibition of sixth-century Chinese Buddhist sculpture of one of the most important groups of Buddhist devotional sites in early medevial China goes on display at the Smithsonian Institution, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C.,  February 26-July 31, 2011. See Link.

On Mar. 10, the Third Annual Conference on Biography at the Leon Levy Center for Biography got underway with a keynote lecture by best-selling author Simon Winchester, on the conference theme, “Biography and Ethics.” Other speakers included Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor; Frances Kiernan, the author of Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy and The Last Mrs. Astor; and Scott Donaldson, who has written biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, among others.

Hosted by LLCB director Brenda Wineapple at the Graduate Center, CUNY, the conference was free and open to the public. The full schedule and other details are here. 

The ancient city of Ur, in Iraq, was the topic of conversation at a recent meeting at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia sponsored by the Leon Levy Foundation.  Participants from the British Museum and from  Iraq, including the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, along with Penn, began planning to make available online all of the objects, archaeological notebooks and other records from the excavations there, led by Sir Leonard Wooley, in the 1920s and ’30s.

Participants included (l t r), top row: Richard L. Zettler, Philippe de Montebello, William Hafford, Stephen J. Tinney, Alessandro Pezzati, John Bernstein, Richard Hodges and Abdulamir Hamdani; front row: Judith H. Dobrzynski, Donny George Youkhanna, C. Brian Rose, Sarah Collins, Shelby White, Ali Kadhim Ghanin, and John Curtis.

The Leon Levy Foundation is supporting a new connoisseurship program, a drawing course designed specifically for graduate students of art history from Columbia University and the Institute of Fine Arts. The course will be offered at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. The fundamental goals of the course are to sharpen visual acuity and deepen insight  into the processes through which works of art come into being.

The Leon Levy Foundation hosted a dinner on Monday, November 15, 2010  at Loeb House, Harvard University, in celebration of  Dr. Peter Der Manuelian’s appointment as the first Philip J. King Chair in Egyptology.

 New York City Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Prospect Park Alliance Chairman Albert H. Garner and New York City Economic Development Corporation President Seth W. Pinsky broke ground on December 15th. Lakeside will replace the winter-only Wollman Rink with a  LEED certified green building and two outdoor skating rinks, which will host ice skating and hockey in the winter and roller skating and water features in the summer. The project includes the ongoing restoration and enchancement of landscape design for the Park.  Shelby White, Trustee, Leon Levy Foundation, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, Prospect Park Alliance President Tupper Thomas, and other honored guests were in attendance.

With a third of American bird species under the threat, the American Bird Conservancy is publishing the first comprehensive guide to the specific dangers they face, and where, as well as the remedies that can save bird populations from dropping even further.

Sponsored by the Leon Levy Foundation, The American Bird Conservancy Guide to Bird Conservation is filled with beautiful color illustrations and range maps. It’s an inspiring reference for anyone who cares about birds and the environment. It’s available in bookstores and on websites now.

“…it contains just about everything one would want to know about bird conservation in North America…” — Grant McCreary, The Birder’s Library

“…there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that this beautiful and comprehensive book is both groundbreaking and important…” — Charlie Moores, 10,000 Birds

The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York has recognized the Leon Levy Foundation’s Archives Program with its annual Outstanding Support of Archives award. At a ceremony on Oct. 20, the Round Table cited the Foundation’s broad support for many cultural archives, for creating the Leon Levy Archives Center on its website as a gateway to other archives, and for raising the profile of archives at various institutions. Read more here.

Dr. Ingo Mellinghoff, a 2010-2011 Leon Levy Foundation Young Investigator at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and a multicenter team have uncovered the relationship between two proteins that play a critical role in gliobastoma, the most common form of brain cancer. This discovery may result in improved treatments for glioblastoma patients with tumors that have had molecular changes.

The Leon Levy Center for Biography’s 2010 Annual Lecture, which featured Ron Chernow (left), drew a capacity crowd to the Graduate Center/CUNY’s Proshansky Auditorium on Sept. 28, 2010. On the eve of publication of his new book, Washington: A Life, a definitive one-volume biography of the nation’s first president, Chernow spoke amusingly of Washington’s relationship with his mother, among other things.

Drawing on the research he did for his other award-winning biographies, of  Alexander Hamilton, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Chernow also illustrated how what is missing from a subject’s records can be as telling as what he, or she, wrote and saved.

On Monday, May 23, 2011, Columbia Psychiatry Chairman Jeffrey Lieberman, MD hosted  Leon Levy Trustees Elizabeth B. Moynihan and Shelby White and President John W. Bernstein at a luncheon to present the continuing recipients of the Leon Levy Resident and Neuroscience Fellowships and the newly named recipients for the 2011-2012 academic year. The Fellowships are awarded to individuals with MD/PhD degrees and a research focus on neuroscience.

In the Leon Levy Lecture given on April 11, 2011 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Rohini Somanathan, Leon Levy Foundation Member in the  School of Social Science, and Professor in the Delhi School of  Economics explored the emergence and the consequences of the strategy adopted by the Indian state to equalize opportunity. See link.

Peter Der Manuelian , who leads a project to digitize materials from a complex of tombs, temples, and ancient artifacts surrounding Egypt’s famous Giza pyramids, has been named as the first Philip J. King Professor of Egyptology at Harvard University, effective July 1, 2010. Der Manuelian comes to Harvard from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he is director of the Giza Archives Project and the Giza Mastabas Project , and from Tufts University where he has been a lecturer in Egyptology since 2000.

“Edward Hirsch, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, announced today (April 14, 2010) that in its eighty-sixth annual competition for the United States and Canada the Foundation has awarded 180 Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars….chosen from a group of some 3,000 applicants.”

Link to Press Release.

The Leon Levy Foundation provides supplemental awards to fellows with no academic or institutional affiliation; in 2010, 60 awardees qualified for supplements.

A community Open House was held February 19th in Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera, to celebrate the partnership between the Bahamas National Trust and the Leon Levy Foundation to create the Leon Levy Native Plant Preserve (a 25-acre sanctuary that will showcase the Bahamas rich plant life). The project is expected to bring more than $2 million into the local economy. Open House attendees included the Hon. Earl D. Deveaux, members of the Bahamas National Trust Council/Eric Carey, Executive Director of the Trust Eric Cary, Shelby White, founding trustee of the Leon Levy Foundation, and other local government officials and community members. Link to article.

For the last four years, the Foundation has brought together archivists from institutions that have received a Leon Levy Archives and Catalogues grant. These annual roundtables not only provide an opportunity for participants to discuss topical issues and learn from each other, but also to visit the premises of a grantee. This year, the Morgan Library and Museum hosted the event, with director William Griswold showing off the restored McKim building, and curators from the department of historical and literary manuscripts, led by Declan Kiely, showing participants the vault, reading room and conservation center. The discussion topic was institutional support for archives.

In 2009, the archives of the Museum of Modern Art hosted the event, and in 2010, the Center for Jewish History provided the venue (picture), with Chief Operating Officer Michael Glickman relating how the processing of the papers of Rafael Lempkin — the man who coined the term “genocide” – led to a conference, an exhibition, public programs and a website. Tiffany Nixon, archivist at the Roundabout Theatre, spoke on ”Ten Lessons I’ve Learned Collecting ‘Lost’ Archival Treasures.”

When considering a new program, the Leon Levy Foundation often convenes groups of experts for advice. That’s what happened in early February, 2010, when several distinguished archaeologists, museum directors, and curators from around the world gathered at the Foundation’s offices. Led by the Foundation’s Special Advisor, Philippe de Montebello, they discussed how best to make available the trove of unpublished information from important ancient world sites excavated under “partage” agreements. The partage system, through which western universities and museums worked in concert with host countries on digs, then divided the discoveries, was at its height at the turn of the last century. Many of the most important sites of the ancient world were excavated through these partnerships, which continue even today. The Foundation hopes to play a leadership role in making this information available to scholars around the world.

The January-February 2010 issue of Playbill describes the digitization project at the New York Philharmonic archives that will allow scholars — and the public — to explore the orchestra’s rich history. Funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, the project is expected to be a model for other arts institutions striving to make the contents of their institutional archives available to scholars and the public.

Read the article here.