AIAC AT THE COUNCIL FOR CANADIAN AMERICAN RELATIONS GALA 2026 AT THE METROPOLITAN CLUB OF NEW YORK

For Immediate Release

New York, NY - May 11, 2026 - L. M. Levie, Chairman of American Industrial Acquisition Corporation (AIAC) and Trustee and Poet Laureate of The Explorers Club, joined a distinguished gathering of Canadian and American cultural, civic, and business leaders for the biennial Gala of the Council for Canadian American Relations (CCAR), held at the Metropolitan Club of New York. Mr. Levie attended as the guest of CCAR Executive Director Jessica London, CCAR Manager of Programs & Development Jacqueline Sather, and Mr. Jim Sidorchuk, alongside a delegation from Onex Corporation, the Toronto-headquartered global investment firm.

The CCAR 2026 Gala: An Evening of Friendship Through the Arts

The Council for Canadian American Relations was founded in 1972 - originally as the American Friends of Canada - at the instigation of the late Canadian philanthropist Bluma Appel and through the guidance of the late David Rockefeller and the late Prime Minister of Canada, The Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau. For more than five decades, under the enduring motto Friendship Through the Arts, CCAR has advanced the public's appreciation of the arts on both sides of the 49th parallel, supporting more than 250 cultural institutions in Canada and the United States with cash grants, gifts of art, and cross-border scholarship programs in visual arts, music, dance, and dramatic arts.

The 2026 Gala continued a tradition carried forward in recent years by such honorees as Stan Douglas, Annabelle Selldorf, Rob Sobey, Pamela J. Joyner, and Margaret Atwood (2024); Karen Kain, Darren Walker, Pierre Lassonde, and Nada Ristich (the 50th Anniversary Gala, 2022); Christopher Plummer, Jo Carole Lauder, and Guy Laliberté (2019); and Frank Stella, The Honourable Hilary M. Weston, and Norman Jewison (2017). Held once again at the historic Metropolitan Club of New York, this year's evening drew patrons, collectors, artists, diplomats, and corporate leaders from across the United States and Canada for a black-tie dinner devoted to the cross-border arts mission CCAR has championed for over half a century.

The Evening's Program

The Gala opened with welcoming remarks by David W. Binet, Chair of the Council for Canadian American Relations, followed by an address from Tom Clark, Consul General of Canada in New York. The veteran Canadian broadcast journalist - a longtime anchor and correspondent for CTV National News and Global News before his appointment as Consul General in 2023 - set the tone for an evening devoted to the cultural ties between the two countries.

The Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts in Canada and the United States was presented to Yannick Nézet-Séguin by Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, who has led the Met since 2006. The companion Award for Distinguished Contributions was then presented to Cindy Sherman by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, one of the foremost curators and scholars of contemporary photography. The CCAR Arts Leadership Awards to Glenn D. Lowry and Matthew Teitelbaum were presented by Ron Graham, the distinguished Canadian author and journalist, former President of PEN Canada, and former Chair of the Royal Ontario Museum's Institute for Contemporary Culture. Consul General Clark returned to the podium to deliver the evening's closing remarks.

Over the course of the evening, Mr. Levie greeted and congratulated each of the four honorees - Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Cindy Sherman, Glenn D. Lowry, and Matthew Teitelbaum - as well as each of the evening's presenters, including Peter Gelb, Roxana Marcoci, Ron Graham, and Consul General Tom Clark.

The 2026 Honorees

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, CC, OQ

Recipient, Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts in Canada and the United States

Born in Montreal in 1975, Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera (since 2018), Music and Artistic Director of The Philadelphia Orchestra (since 2012), and Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Montreal's Orchestre Métropolitain (since 2000, for life since 2019). A five-time Grammy Award winner who records exclusively for Deutsche Grammophon, he is a Companion of the Order of Canada and an Officer of the National Order of Quebec, and Honorary Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Cindy Sherman

Recipient, Award for Distinguished Contributions to the Arts in Canada and the United States

Born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, in 1954, Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential American artists of the past half-century, who, since the late 1970s, has redefined photographic self-portraiture and our relationship to mass-cultural images. Her landmark series Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980) was acquired in its entirety by the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, which devoted a major retrospective to her work in 2012. She is a MacArthur Fellow (1995) and recipient of the Praemium Imperiale (2016).

Glenn D. Lowry

Recipient, CCAR Arts Leadership Award

Born in New York City in 1954 and educated at Williams College and Harvard University, Glenn D. Lowry served as the David Rockefeller Director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1995 to 2025, the longest tenure in MoMA's history, leading the institution through two major expansions and the 1999 merger with P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. He had previously served as Director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from 1990 to 1995, and in December 2025 joined the Board of Trustees of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

Matthew Teitelbaum, CM

Recipient, CCAR Arts Leadership Award

Born in Toronto in 1956, Matthew Teitelbaum, CM, served as the Ann and Graham Gund Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 2015 to 2025, having previously led the Art Gallery of Ontario for twenty-two years - first as Chief Curator, then, from 1998, as the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO, where he oversaw the landmark $306 million Frank Gehry transformation of the Gallery. A past President of the Association of Art Museum Directors, he is a Member of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France.

Mr. Levie's Hosts and the Onex Delegation

Jessica London

Executive Director, Council for Canadian American Relations

A graduate of Carleton University in Ottawa and a veteran arts administrator on both sides of the border, Jessica London has served as Executive Director of CCAR since 2012. Before joining the Council, she held senior leadership posts at the Society for Experiential Graphic Design, the French Heritage Society, the Museum of Arts & Design in New York, and The Frick Collection, as well as Arts & Communications in Toronto, one of Canada's foremost cultural sponsorship agencies. Under her stewardship, CCAR has expanded its scholarship programs in the visual arts, music, dance, and dramatic arts, and has deepened its grant-making to cultural institutions across Canada and the United States.

Jacqueline Sather

Manager of Programs & Development, Council for Canadian American Relations

Jacqueline Sather serves as Manager of Programs & Development at the Council for Canadian American Relations, where she works alongside Executive Director Jessica London on the Council's grant-making, scholarship, and event programs in Canada and the United States.

Jim Sidorchuk

Private Investor

A longtime patron of the Council, Mr. Sidorchuk is a private investor whose professional career was shaped at Bain and at Morgan Stanley.

The Delegation from Onex Corporation

Onex Corporation, founded in Toronto in 1984 by Gerald W. ("Gerry") Schwartz, OC, is one of the world's leading private investment firms, with approximately US $59 billion in assets under management and offices in Toronto, New York, Englewood Cliffs (New Jersey), and London. Listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker ONEX, the firm invests on behalf of public and private pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals through its private equity platforms Onex Partners and ONCAP and through a range of credit strategies. Under the leadership of Founder and Chairman Gerald W. Schwartz and, since 2023, of Chief Executive Officer Bobby Le Blanc, Onex has, for more than four decades, exemplified the principled stewardship of capital. The firm's senior delegation joined the Gala in keeping with Onex's longstanding commitment to the cultural institutions of both countries.

David W. Binet

Chair, Council for Canadian American Relations

A Toronto-based corporate director and one of the most respected stewards of Canadian institutional and cultural life, David W. Binet serves as Chair of the CCAR Board of Directors. His leadership of the Council, alongside Treasurer Shawn Trudeau of Neuberger Berman and Secretary Stanley M. Ackert III, has been instrumental in carrying CCAR's founding mission into its sixth decade.

A Statement from AIAC Chairman L. M. Levie

AIAC Chairman L. M. Levie issued the following statement on his attendance at the 2026 CCAR Gala:

"It is a profound honor and joy to join the Council for Canadian American Relations and its remarkable team for this celebration of the enduring friendship between two nations that share the longest peaceful border on earth - and one of the richest cultural inheritances. For more than half a century, CCAR has done something rare and quietly heroic: it has insisted, through the arts, that what binds the United States and Canada together is more durable than what occasionally divides us. From the visionary founders - David Rockefeller, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and the late Bluma Appel - to the leaders who have carried this work forward in our own day, the Council has been a steady custodian of the cross-border imagination.

This evening's four honorees together compose a kind of map of that cross-border imagination at its very best. In Yannick Nézet-Séguin, a Montrealer who, in a single career, has remade the Metropolitan Opera in New York, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and Montreal's own Orchestre Métropolitain - and who carries between them the title of Companion of the Order of Canada and the gift of one of the most generous musical temperaments of his generation - we see the cultural friendship between our two countries given the form of music itself. In Cindy Sherman, whose half-century of self-portraiture has, perhaps more than any other body of work in our lifetime, taught us how to look at the image, we honor an artist whose work belongs as fully to the Canadian imagination as it does to the American one. In Glenn D. Lowry, who shaped the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto before serving for three decades as the David Rockefeller Director of the Museum of Modern Art, and in Matthew Teitelbaum, who carried the Art Gallery of Ontario through its Gehry transformation and then led the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a decade as its Ann and Graham Gund Director, we honor two leaders whose own biographies trace the very route - Toronto to New York, Toronto to Boston - that CCAR has spent half a century keeping open. To recognize all four in a single evening, at the Metropolitan Club of New York, is to do precisely what CCAR was founded to do.

The evening's program was as fitting as its honorees. To hear Peter Gelb of the Metropolitan Opera speak for Yannick, Roxana Marcoci of the Museum of Modern Art speak for Cindy Sherman, and Ron Graham - one of Canada's most thoughtful chroniclers of his country's cultural and political life - speak for Glenn Lowry and Matthew Teitelbaum, was to be reminded that the cultural community of New York and the cultural community of Canada are, in truth, a single community. Consul General Tom Clark's opening and closing remarks, delivered with the warmth and clarity for which his long career in Canadian journalism is so admired, gave the evening its diplomatic frame; and CCAR Chair David W. Binet's welcome at the outset set its tone of cross-border friendship and shared purpose. It was my distinct honor to greet each of the honorees and each of the presenters over the course of the evening, and to congratulate them in person on the contributions that brought them to this stage.

It was an extraordinary delight to attend as the guest of my friends Jessica London, whose stewardship of CCAR since 2012 has been marked by extraordinary grace, ambition, and integrity; Jacqueline Sather, whose work as the Council's Manager of Programs & Development is at the very heart of the planning and execution of an evening of this scale; and Jim Sidorchuk, whose generosity of spirit and hospitality made the evening all the warmer. I was equally glad to spend the evening with the distinguished delegation from Onex Corporation - an institution founded by Gerry Schwartz in 1984, led today by Bobby Le Blanc, and now, in its fifth decade, one of the great expressions of Canadian enterprise on the world stage.

The evening had a particular resonance for the AIAC family, given our own longstanding commitment to Canada. For decades, AIAC has built and operated a meaningful Canadian presence - through our operating companies Canadian Kraft Paper Industries, Arnprior Aerospace, and Ti Titanium Ltd.; through our joint venture NISO; and through the Kraft Paper Charitable Foundation, whose philanthropic outreach extends across Manitoba. To celebrate, on this evening in New York, the cultural friendship between the United States and a country in which so many of our colleagues, partners, and operating teams live and work, was to celebrate something already at the very heart of our own enterprise.

I was equally glad to greet CCAR Chair David W. Binet, whose quiet, principled leadership of the Council embodies the very best of the Canadian tradition of public service, and to congratulate the entire Board, the Honorary Directors, and the friends of the Council whose generosity makes its work possible. CCAR's grants have touched more than 250 cultural institutions across the continent, from the Metropolitan Opera and the Canadian Opera Company to the National Ballet of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the Banff Centre, and the Museum of Modern Art - the very institutions that, taken together, form the cultural commons of North America, and the very institutions over which this evening's four honorees have, in their respective lives, presided with such distinction.

It is also a beautiful confluence - and one not lost on me - that the cross-border community gathered this evening shares so much with another community I am proud to call my own: The Explorers Club, on whose Board of Trustees I am honored to serve. The friendship between the United States and Canada has, after all, always been written first by the explorers, the artists, and the immigrants who have moved freely between the two countries - and from whose work both nations have drawn so much of what is best in them. CCAR's tradition, in this sense, is exploration in another form.

On behalf of AIAC and our worldwide affiliates, I extend our heartfelt congratulations to Maestro Nézet-Séguin, Ms. Sherman, Dr. Lowry, and Mr. Teitelbaum on this most deserved recognition; to Mr. Gelb, Ms. Marcoci, and Mr. Graham for their gracious and illuminating tributes; to Consul General Tom Clark for his stewardship of the evening; and to David W. Binet, the entire CCAR Board and staff, and every patron of the 2026 Gala - and our profound thanks to Jim Sidorchuk and to the delegation from Onex Corporation for the warmth and grace of their hospitality."

About the Council for Canadian American Relations

The Council for Canadian American Relations (CCAR) is a U.S. nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, recognized as a Qualified Donee by the Canada Revenue Agency under the Income Tax Act (Canada). Founded in 1972 - originally as the American Friends of Canada - at the instigation of Bluma Appel and through the guidance of David Rockefeller and Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, CCAR advances the public's appreciation of the arts by conducting programs and activities in Canada and the United States that support arts and cultural institutions functioning in and between the two countries. Operating under the enduring motto Friendship Through the Arts, CCAR has supported more than 250 cultural organizations on both sides of the border through grants, cross-border scholarship programs in visual arts, music, dance, and dramatic arts, and special gifts and loans of works of art. CCAR is led by Chair David W. Binet and Executive Director Jessica London.

For further information, please see: https://www.ccar-nyc.org

About The Metropolitan Club of New York

Founded in 1891 by John Pierpont ("J. P.") Morgan and a small circle of prominent New Yorkers - among them members of the Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Goelet, and Whitney families - The Metropolitan Club of New York is one of the most distinguished private clubs in the United States. Mr. Morgan served as the Club's first President. Its landmark clubhouse, designed by the celebrated architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White under the direction of Stanford White and completed in 1894, occupies the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and East 60th Street, directly opposite Central Park, and is widely regarded as among the finest examples of the Italian Renaissance style in New York. A designated New York City landmark, the clubhouse has served for more than a century and a quarter as the setting for some of the city's most important civic, philanthropic, and cultural gatherings, including the biennial Gala of the Council for Canadian American Relations.

For further information, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Club_%28New_York_City%29

About Onex Corporation

Founded in Toronto in 1984 by Gerald W. Schwartz, OC, Onex Corporation is one of the world's leading private investment firms, with approximately US $59 billion in assets under management and offices in Toronto, New York, Englewood Cliffs (New Jersey), and London. Listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker ONEX, the firm invests on behalf of public and private pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, family offices, and high-net-worth individuals through its two private equity platforms - Onex Partners and ONCAP - and through a range of private credit, liquid credit, and public equity strategies. Onex is led by Founder and Chairman Gerald W. Schwartz and by Chief Executive Officer Bobby Le Blanc.

For further information, please see: https://www.onex.com

About American Industrial Acquisition Corporation

American Industrial Acquisition Corporation (AIAC) is a diversified industrial group with manufacturing and distribution sites in 24 countries in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia-New Zealand. AIAC has acquired and grown non-core subsidiaries and divisions of Boeing, Siemens, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Johnson Controls, Merck, Pfizer, Astellas, Visteon, Carlyle, Ahlstrom, Tolko, Groupe Suez, Groupe Rexel, and many other leading multinational corporations.

AIAC companies serve companies and governmental entities worldwide in all major sectors, including aviation, space, defense, automotive, truck, rail, marine, petrochemical, solar, nuclear, civil engineering and infrastructure, commercial construction, mining, disaster relief, education, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. In addition, AIAC companies are exclusive, authorized distributors of leading branded industrial and consumer products and serve as critical suppliers for the construction of major airports, schools, hospitals, performing arts and sports centers, offices and hotels throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. AIAC is a leading manufacturer of building, street, and highway signage in Europe, and a distributor of electrical products throughout France.

Of note, AIAC purchased Boeing Canada in 2005 and has produced over 10,000 unique components for every Boeing jet plane ever since, reliably serving Boeing from manufacturing facilities in North America. A leader in ultra-high precision jet engine component manufacturing, AIAC companies produce 2,200 fan blades for each jet engine produced by GE, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, and Honeywell.

AIAC companies actively support exploration into outer space, manufacturing critical components for launching and propelling spacecraft and satellites. AIAC customers in this sector include NASA, the European Space Agency, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing. AIAC affiliate, Champlain Cable Corporation, supported the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space missions with high performance wire and cable. AIAC companies also lead in the design and manufacture of undersea umbilical cables for worldwide oceanographic research.

AIAC companies produce the critical automotive wire and cable for Tesla, GM, Ford, Chrysler-Fiat, Toyota, and Nissan. In connection with its kraft paper manufacturing interests in Canada and the US, AIAC sustainably manages 22 million acres of Manitoba, Canada forestland, an area equivalent in size to the nation of Hungary.

AIAC affiliate, Metallwarenfabrik Gemmingen GmbH, located in Germany, designs, manufactures and distributes high performance, emergency portable power generators utilized in global conflict zones and during natural disasters.

For further information, please see https://www.aiac.com.

About AIAC Philanthropy

AIAC and the AIAC Foundation support a wide range of nonprofit, nonsectarian, bipartisan organizations which promote international conflict resolution, disaster relief, economic development, environmental sustainability, exploration, and the performing arts.

The exploration-focused nonprofit organizations which they actively support include The Explorers Club, the National Geographic Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Space Society, and the United States Space Foundation.

AIAC's other beneficiaries include the Appeal of the Nobel Peace Laureates Foundation Inc., the Asia Society, the Atlantic Council, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - Gates Philanthropy Partners, the Bretton Woods Committee, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carter Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association, the Institut Française des Relations Internationales, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Crisis Group, the International Rescue Committee, the Japan Society, the JFK School of Government of Harvard University, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Richardson Center for Global Engagement, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), the Sierra Club, the Trilateral Commission, and the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

L. M. Levie, Chairman of AIAC, serves as a Trustee of The Explorers Club, a Trustee of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, and as Chairman of The D'Oyly Carte Foundation.

For further information, please see: https://www.aiac.com/our-values

About The Explorers Club

Founded in 1904, The Explorers Club is a prestigious international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. Based at its historic headquarters in New York City, the Club has served as a meeting point and unifying force for explorers and scientists worldwide for over a century.

The Club's membership includes many of history's most renowned explorers and scientists, from polar explorers Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen to oceanic pioneers Jacques Cousteau and Robert Ballard, from aviation legends Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart to space pioneers like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell. The Club continues to support cutting-edge exploration in every realm - from the deepest ocean trenches to the highest peaks, from archaeological discoveries to space missions.

The Explorers Club is renowned for its rigorous standards of membership, requiring nominees to have made significant contributions to exploration or the sciences that advance our understanding of the world. The Club's Board of Trustees, Legacy Society, and various committees work to preserve the Club's mission while fostering new generations of explorers through grants, expeditions, and educational programs.

The Club's famous annual dinner, featuring exotic cuisine and presentations by leading explorers, has become legendary in New York society. More importantly, The Explorers Club continues to fund and support expeditions that push the boundaries of human knowledge, from climate research in Antarctica to biodiversity studies in remote rainforests to preparations for future Mars missions.

AIAC Chairman L. M. Levie serves as Member of its Board of Trustees and as Poet Laureate and Member of its Legacy Society. As Poet Laureate, Mr. Levie contributes to the Club's cultural mission by capturing the spirit of exploration through verse, honoring both historical achievements and contemporary discoveries that continue to expand the frontiers of human knowledge and experience.

For further information, please see: https://www.explorers.org

About The D'Oyly Carte Foundation

The D'Oyly Carte Foundation is the American affiliate of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Trust Limited, the United Kingdom charity that supports the historic D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. A Delaware corporation and a U.S. Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit institution, the Foundation supports and promotes the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's United Kingdom and international touring, assists regional performance companies, schools, colleges, and universities dedicated to the staging of Gilbert & Sullivan operas, and encourages the popular appreciation of the works of Gilbert & Sullivan more broadly.

Founded in 1875 by the English impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte (1844-1901), the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is the historic professional home of the fourteen Savoy operas of Sir W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan - including Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, The Mikado, Ruddigore, The Yeomen of the Guard, The Gondoliers, Utopia, Limited, and The Grand Duke - which it has produced professionally in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia for more than a century and a half. In March 2025, the Company, the Trust, and the Foundation jointly marked the 150th anniversary of the 1875 premiere of Trial by Jury at the Royalty Theatre in London, the founding work of one of the most celebrated partnerships in the history of musical theatre. The Company today produces in partnership with Scottish Opera, Opera Holland Park, and English National Opera.

AIAC Chairman L. M. Levie serves as Chairman of The D'Oyly Carte Foundation.

For further information, please see: https://www.doylycartefoundation.org

Media Contact

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American Industrial Acquisition Corporation
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