Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden B. Johnson and Smithsonian Secretary S. Dillon Ripley successfully campaigned for a new museum on the National Mall. In 1966, an Act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Most of the funding was federal, but Hirshhorn later contributed $1-million toward construction. Joseph and his fourth wife, Olga Zatorsky Hirshhorn, visited the White House. The groundbreaking was in 1969 and Abram Lerner was named the founding Director. He oversaw research, conservation, and installation of more than 6,000 items brought from the Hirshhorns' Connecticut estate and other properties to Washington, DC. Joseph Hirshhorn spoke at the inauguration
Conservation and restoration at the Smithsonian Institution effort to conserve species and train future generations of conservationists. Ecological processes are highly complex... life and the world are dynamic and ever-changing—it is only with long-term records that many [biological] trends can be deciphered. The SCBI is the only unit of the Smithsonian Institution exclusively devoted to the study of wildlife conservation. Giant pandas, Asian elephants, white-naped cranes, western lowland gorillas, Sumatran tigers, cheetahs, and North Island brown kiwis. Global Tiger Initiative At the National Museum of Natural History, the Anthropology Conservation Laboratory (ACL) conducts conservation on the National Museum of Natural history's more than 126 million natural science