The Redwood Library & Athenæum announced today that Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, and Co-Founder of Blackstone, will deliver the John J Slocum Memorial Lecture next month. Details follow:
“Lessons in Leadership: A Conversation with Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of Blackstone”
Presentation and Reception
Friday, August 11, 2023 | 6 pm | Redwood Library & Athenæum
Tickets: $100 per person
All proceeds to benefit the Redwood Library & Athenæum
In making the announcement, Redwood Executive Director, Benedict Leca said, “As we continue to fulfill our mission as a civic commons, we are committed to welcoming and gaining insights in all domains from thought leaders such as Mr. Schwarzman and look forward to an informative talk.”
The event is open to the public. To purchase tickets visit redwoodlibrary.org/events.
Blackstone is one of the world’s leading investment firms, with approximately $1 trillion in Assets Under Management. The firm has established leading investing businesses across asset classes, including private equity, where it is a global leader in traditional buyout, growth equity, special situations and secondary investing; real estate, where it is currently the largest owner of commercial property in the world; hedge fund solutions, where it is the world’s largest discretionary hedge fund investor; and credit, where it is a global leader and major provider of credit for small, middle-market and other companies. Blackstone also has major businesses dedicated to infrastructure and life sciences investing, as well as delivering the firm’s investment management expertise and products to insurance companies.
Steve is an active philanthropist who dedicates himself to tackling big problems. His major gifts have helped establish a new center at the University of Oxford to redefine the study of the humanities for the 21st century, create a new college at MIT dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, build a first-of-its-kind student center at Yale, renovate and expand the New York Public Library, and found an international fellowship program, Schwarzman Scholars, at Tsinghua University in Beijing to educate future leaders about China.
In 2019 published his first book, What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence, a New York Times best seller which draws on his experiences in business, philanthropy, and public service.
The Redwood Library & Athenæum is America’s first purpose-built library (1747), and the oldest continuously operating in its original location. Housed in the earliest public Neoclassic building in the U.S., and containing Rhode Island’s first art gallery (1875), it has functioned for nearly three-hundred years as Newport’s intellectual core, a humanities center and civic learning hub styled after ideals of ancient Athenian culture and philosophy.
As an athenaeum—an interdisciplinary ‘think space’ comprising a library, museum, and research center— the Redwood is home to 200,000 volumes, with particular strengths in early American history and material culture, early modern architecture, decorative arts and garden design, eighteenth-century European illustrated books, and the history of Newport and Rhode Island. The museum holds an important collection of portrait paintings and artifacts, and features two gallery spaces for rotating exhibitions. With these resources the Redwood provides a range of cultural experiences and services: lectures, concerts, and exhibitions, in addition to a lending library and the facilities for the scholarly study of its historic holdings.
Created as a community endeavor by its namesake and forty-six original proprietors—what has been described as the single “greatest act of philanthropy in colonial America”—the Redwood Library was established to “propagate virtue, knowledge, and useful learning with nothing in view but the good of mankind.” Its premise is that an educated citizenry undergirds civil society and a strong republic. Today, nearly three centuries after its inception as a premier institution of the American Enlightenment, and with an acknowledgment of its founding on the profits of the slave economy of the eighteenth-century sugar trade, it is explicitly committed to the public humanities, defined here as the use of history and culture to address diverse communities to create a more enlightened and equitable world.
