Upper West Sider Mariko Silver Starts Her ‘Dream’ Job as President of Lincoln Center

By Bonnie Eissner

Mariko Silver, who took office as president of Lincoln Center last month, calls her new role “the childhood dream I never knew I had.”

The position is a homecoming of sorts for Silver. The daughter of film producer Joan Shigekawa and filmmaker Tony Silver, Silver, 46, practically grew up in the shadow of Lincoln Center, she said. Her childhood home was up the street, at West End Avenue and West 75th Street, and she attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School a short walk from where she now works. Her mother’s office was at One Lincoln Plaza, and Silver remembers eating lots of tortellini Alfredo at nearby Fiorello’s and tater tots at Top of the One. 

Her strongest memories of Lincoln Center include seeing Patti LuPone in Anything Goes as a kid in 1987 — two or three times. “I just loved it,” she said. Attending the South African musical Sarafina that same year was a “mind-blowing and remarkable experience,” she remembered, and she was there when the celebrated Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli debuted at the Metropolitan Opera in 1996.

Silver came to Lincoln Center after serving for five years as president and CEO of the New York-based Henry Luce Foundation, where she oversaw an increase in grant allocations, including ones to Indigenous, Asian American, and Pacific Islander communities. Before that, she led Bennington College, a liberal arts school in Vermont, for six years, and she served in the Obama administration as acting assistant secretary for international affairs.

Moving to Lincoln Center means that she runs the organization that manages the 16.3-acre campus, which has 11 resident organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and Film at Lincoln Center. Lincoln Center also offers its own performing arts programs, which its constituent organizations sometimes view as competition. 

Silver is undaunted. “I used to run a college. I used to work at a very large university. I worked in the federal government,” she said. “This is not an unfamiliar structure,” she added. “Each one of the constituents is its own separate organization, and we work together to make Lincoln Center more than the sum of its parts.”

Nine days into her job, Silver exuded the confidence of a seasoned executive and the enthusiasm of a long-time admirer when she spoke to West Side Rag about presiding over what she calls “one of the gems of the Upper West Side, but also of Manhattan, of New York City, of the United States, the world.”

Following are lightly edited excerpts from that conversation. 

How do you plan to balance Lincoln Center’s classical music tradition with the need or the desire to reach a wider audience?

Silver: The classical arts are absolutely and always will be part of Lincoln Center. The question is how we ensure that every generation of New Yorkers engages and appreciates and ideally builds a love for all the performing arts, because the performing arts are so essential. I mean, of course, to Lincoln Center, but they’re essential to New York City. The sense of possibility that draws people to New York is essentially driven by those investments in creativity, those investments in performance, those investments in risk-taking—that sense that this is a place where you can have a voice. 

The binary is not my way of thinking about it. I think it should be about the capaciousness and the efflorescence of creativity and how we ensure that that continues to be, as it historically has been, one of the major engines of New York City.

Plans are under way to change the Amsterdam Avenue entrance to Lincoln Center. What are your priorities are for that project? 

Silver: I think the West Project [to break down the wall that barricades Lincoln Center from Amsterdam Avenue and the Amsterdam Houses across the street] is extraordinarily important not only to the future of Lincoln Center, but also to the future of the city; and I am committed to having the West Project embody the city that we want to be. That means open invitation, an open spirit of welcome, and an invitation to come in and experience others performing, but also to inhabit that space as a community. And by that, I mean everyone who passes through that park. It’s a park for the neighborhood. It’s a park for the city. It’s a park for performance, and we want to make it the park that New York deserves and the performance venue that New York deserves. 

We all love the city, or we wouldn’t live here. And New York is hectic; New York has a lot of hardscape [man-made structures]. And right now, that park is a lot of hardscape. We all know, of course, Central Park is the lungs of Manhattan, and Riverside Park and now the High Line and Little Island. We just want to make our contribution to that sense of community engagement and welcome and bringing some natural elements back to this corner of New York City.

It’s expensive to run Lincoln Center. What are your plans for raising funds? 

Silver: We have to raise money. We have to have revenue. We are a performing arts center for the people. We are a performing arts center for the community. We are a performing arts center for the city and for the country and for the world, and we have to invest in lowering the barriers to entry or raising the spirit of invitation in order to fulfill our public service mission. And that costs money. 

I was joking with the staff that one of my challenges is that I think I’m never going to be able to wear mascara again. I listened to a recent Juilliard alum play yesterday; it was just a short piano piece, and I was like, ‘I’m going to cry again.’ It’s an invitation to let yourself feel, and everybody deserves that. Everybody needs that, and excellence costs money because those extraordinary artists put their heart and soul out there for us, and that shouldn’t come free. They should be paid, and they should be paid well for baring their souls so that we can find ours.

Some people have described the relationship between Lincoln Center and the constituent organizations as fraught. Do you think that’s accurate?

Silver: That’s not been my experience over the last nine days. People have been extraordinarily welcoming. I think people really pulled together in the pandemic, as people did everywhere, and Lincoln Center was no exception. In fact, I think Lincoln Center was an exemplar in that regard with Restart Stages [free outdoor performances] and a number of other things that they undertook. 

I can’t speak for the constituents, but from my conversations thus far, which have been with all of the presidents of the constituent organizations, they know and love the value of being together here at Lincoln Center. To me, the question is always: Are we maximizing that value on behalf of the art and the artists? 

In any group of people, in any large organization, there are challenges, there are tensions, there are times when we don’t all agree. But I think the value so far outweighs any kind of day-to-day challenges that might come up. I think we all see that, and so in the end, we’re all aimed towards the same North Star.

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