"The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation has provided invaluable support to Exploring the Arts and the New York City public schools we serve. Most exciting is that the Foundation's support has enabled us to build a state-of-the-art, professional-caliber...new building for Frank Sinatra School of the Arts..."
-Susan Benedetto, Co-Founder and President, and Tony Bennett, Co-Founder and Board Member, Exploring the Arts
RECENT GRANTS
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation works to fulfill its founders’ commitment to providing philanthropic leadership in two principal arenas: medicine and the arts. Doing so, the Foundation awards grants for programs, facilities, and endowments at distinguished medical, educational, and cultural institutions in the United States and internationally. In the medical arena, the Foundation has for decades supported institutions at the forefront of biomedical research and clinical care, emphasizing healthcare for women. In the arts, the Foundation continues to support exhibitions and other programs that encourage appreciation for the visual and performing arts, promote scholarship, and otherwise enhance cultural life. Furthering the Cantor legacy in the visual arts, the Foundation’s activities in this arena have usually focused on the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his contemporaries.
In medicine, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation has endowed the Iris Cantor Chair at New York City’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. The Chair is funded in honor of Dr. Sidney Winawer, renowned for his studies into the prevention and treatment of digestive cancers.
"For nearly two decades, the Foundation has been a steadfast supporter of Memorial Sloan-Kettering and its lifesaving work... The Foundation's commitment in 2007 to endow the Iris Cantor Chair is paving the way to new progress against digestive cancers, which together constitute the most prevalent form of the disease worldwide and the leading cause of cancer death."
–Sidney J. Winawer, M.D., Paul Sherlock Chair, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Also in medicine, Hospice and Palliative Care of Westchester has received Foundation support in its efforts to inform its community about its vital services.
In the arts, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation is underwriting a number of endeavors:
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Iris Cantor Roof Garden at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts |
We are supporting the new Frank Sinatra School of the Arts’ exciting new campus in Queens with a grant to create the Iris Cantor Roof Garden. This stunning new space, with superb views of the neighborhood, is busy with performances and gatherings that showcase the talents of the School’s remarkable students and that invite the neighborhood into this community treasure. |
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At the Brooklyn Museum of Art we provided a successful challenge grant to support the critically-needed modernization of the audio-visual systems of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium. This modernization enables the Auditorium to continue to serve as a very popular programming venue for the Museum and its community. |
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Ours is the leadership gift in support of an important exhibition that will have visited seven museums in the United States and one in France between 2010 and 2012. The exhibition, traveling under the auspices of FRAME – French Regional and American Museum Exchange – is from the Musée des Beaux-arts de Dijon and features the most important sculptural group of 14th-century Europe, the Mourners: Tomb Sculptures From The Court of Burgundy, an extraordinary and influential project overseen by Claus Sluter. This show will have visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, St. Louis Art Museum, and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, as well as Paris’ Musée du Cluny. It is currently at the Virginia Museum of Art, its last stop in America. |
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Worcester Massachusetts’ Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at College of the Holy Cross has long needed an operating endowment that would enable it to achieve the next level of contribution to the College and the community . We have provided a challenge grant for this endowment.
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With our help, Stanford University’s Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts published a catalogue to accompany its late 2011 exhibition Rodin and America. Scholarly exhibition catalogues have always been of great interest to the Foundation, as they perpetuate what otherwise would be ephemeral.
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Additional grants this year are going to a number of scholars to assist their research into the life and significance of the work of Auguste Rodin. Among the Cantor Fellows are:
| • | Dr. Barbara Larson of the University of West Florida who is studying The Gates of Hell in preparation for a book on the debate between Catholicism and science in early Third Republic France. |
| • | Anne Carolien Willemijn Lindenhovius, who studied Rodin’s illustrations for Baudelaire’s poem “Les Fleurs du Mal” for her dissertation at the University of Utrecht. The Foundation supported her research at the Musée Rodin. |
| • | Musicologist Olivia Mattis who used her fellowship to support research about Rodin and music in the archives of Paris’ Musée Rodin. Her article “Sculpture’s Beethoven: Rodin and Music” was delivered at the 2011 conference "Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism, 1800-1900" at Stony Brook Manhattan. |
"I am a musicologist specializing in the links between music and the visual arts. My project on Rodin and music, sponsored by the Cantor Foundation, will be published in the collection Rival Sisters: Art and Music at the Birth of Modernism. Without support from the Foundation I would not have been able to work on this project, and I remain deeply grateful."
–Olivia Mattis