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Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum Grant Renewed

POSTED ON: March 19, 2026

Annie Lennox on stage with Lori Majewski

Music journalist and SiriusXM radio host Lori Majewski introduces Annie Lennox at the October 14, 2025 Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum event. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation has renewed its support of The Cooper Union’s Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum. The new grant continues the foundation’s support of The Cooper Union’s mission of providing a forum for leading civic and cultural voices and offering free events and programs to New York City audiences. The Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum series links current Great Hall events with the themes and content available in Voices from the Great Hall, Cooper’s digital archive encompassing the room’s more than 165-year history through audio and video files, photographs, and ephemera. The archive was originally made possible through the Gardiner Foundation’s support in 2018. With this latest grant, the Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum will continue to offer free public programs through 2028. 

Since its inception in 2023, the Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum has presented performances by the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, which held its first concert at The Cooper Union in 1980, alongside trailblazing trans artists Murray Hill and Mx Vivian Bond among others; talks by activists and legends like Gloria Steinem, Patti Smith, and Annie Lennox; and historic political discussions such as a 2025 Mayoral Candidate Forum in partnership with the NAACP New York State conference and NYCLU. The NAACP held its inaugural public conference and many of its earliest meetings in the Great Hall at the turn of the century. 

For the Spring 2026 semester, the Gardiner Foundation Great Hall Forum will host the pioneering cultural icon Fred Brathwaite, also known as Fab 5 Freddy, whose creativity reshaped the worlds of art, style, and music, in conversation with Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James, who most recently spoke in 2019 from the Great Hall stage. The series will continue with an appearance by artist and Cooper Union alumnus Daniel Arsham on March 24 and a special screening of the Oscar-nominated Mr. Nobody Against Putin on April 23. Learn more about these and other programs in the Voices from the Great Hall archive.

More News from The Cooper Union

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.