Officials at the new Asian Art Museum of San Francisco are hoping that a $5 million gift for a new theater will spur similar donations from other benefactors, the San Francisco Examiner reports.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and her husband, Richard Blum, promised the money for a planned performance venue, to be built as part of a new cultural center in San Francisco called the Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Arts and Culture.

The cultural center will be housed at what was once the Main Public Library in downtown. It will replace the current Asian Art Museum, which is in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

The couple's $5 million may enable the newly-titled Dianne Feinstein & Richard C. Blum Theater to open with the rest of the museum in 2002. Another $25 million is still needed, however.

Tim Hallman, a museum spokesperson, told the newspaper its "a question of how quickly the theater could be built after the new museum was finished."

Blum is an investment banker and a consul-general to Nepal. He also is founder of the American Himalayan Foundation.

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