And she was easy to boast about. A principal dancer with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet from 1954 to 1963, she later became a trustee and a major fund-raiser for American Ballet Theater and president of the Dance Notation Bureau. In New Mexico, she was the project manager for a condominium community the couple developed. And as chairwoman of the Santa Fe Opera, she was instrumental in fund-raising for a renovation of the open-air opera house and then, with Mr. Zeckendorf, oversaw the $9 million transformation of a 1931 movie theater into the Lensic Performing Arts Center, where she is now chairwoman of the board.

But it was her years as a ballerina, Mrs. Zeckendorf said, that influenced the streamlined design of her New York apartment. “I will never forget the openness of the rehearsal studio at the old Metropolitan Opera, which was four stories high,” she said. “Being a dancer, you are so aware of space and the efficiency of it, and the lack of clutter.”

The Museum Tower apartment, overlooking the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden, is immaculate, spare and airy, with skyline views amplified by judiciously placed mirrors. “The idea was to bring the outside in,” she said.

Her dance career is reflected in her choice of art as well. In the powder room is a framed fragment of the gilded proscenium from the old Met, which was demolished in 1967, and sketches of sets for the ballet “Les Noces” and the opera “Don Giovanni” by her friend Oliver Smith, who was a director of American Ballet Theater. In her dressing room are 19th-century lithographs of ballerinas like Marie Taglioni and Fanny Elssler.

An oblong sculpture in the living room resembles a dancer, although “her feet are not turned out properly,” she said. “We bought this in Ischia, an island off the coast of Naples, where I would go every year for mud baths when I was dancing. I loved her because she reminded me of Eurydice from one of my favorite operas, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice.’ ”

In a glass-walled corner of the living room, a bronze sculpture of a woman holding her hands over her head — “La Lune,” by Henri Laurens — has a dancer’s sense of movement. And two tabletop sculptures — a bronze of Bacchus and an earthenware eighth-century Tang dynasty horse — recall her husband’s passions for wine and horseback riding.

Today, Mrs. Zeckendorf shuttles between New Mexico and Manhattan, depending on the cultural calendar. She is a regular at the Santa Fe Opera during the summer and never misses American Ballet Theater’s fall and spring seasons in New York. But her upcoming travel schedule is dictated by events to promote the publication of “Developing.”