Gateways Music Festival to Receive $150,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

Media Contacts:

Dolores Orman, Gateways Music Festival, 585-271-5185, dolores.orman@gmail.com

Jessica Kaufman, Eastman School of Music, 585-274-1057, jkaufman@esm.rochester.edu

Gateways Music Festival in association with Eastman School of Music is pleased to announce approval to receive an American Rescue Plan (ARP) grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to help the arts and cultural sector recover from the pandemic. Gateways is recommended to receive $150,000 and may use this funding for jobs, operations and facilities, health and safety supplies, and marketing and promotional efforts to encourage attendance and participation. In total, the NEA will award grants totaling $57,750,000 to 567 arts organizations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, DC.

This grant is in addition to a $20,000 Grants for Arts Projects award announced in January to support 2022 Gateways Music Festival, including the Gateways Orchestra’s New York City and Carnegie Hall debut. The 2022 Gateways Music Festival is among 1,248 projects across America totaling $28,840,000 that were selected to receive this first round of fiscal year 2022 funding in the Grants for Arts Projects category.

“Our nation’s arts sector has been among the hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Endowment for the Arts’ American Rescue Plan funding will help arts organizations, such as Gateways Music Festival, rebuild and reopen,” said Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the NEA. “The arts are crucial in helping America’s communities heal, unite, and inspire, as well as essential to our nation’s economic recovery.” 

“Gateways Music Festival is grateful for and thrilled to receive this vote of confidence and vital support from the National Endowment for the Arts for our efforts to enrich our nation’s cultural landscape and to showcase the historical and ongoing contributions of classical musicians of African descent,” said Lee Koonce, Gateways’ president and artistic. 

 The upcoming dual-city festival is Gateways’ most ambitious in its 28-year history and will take place from April 18 through April 24, 2022, in Rochester, NY, and New York City. The Orchestra’s program at Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, includes Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Florence Price’s Third Symphony and Sinfonia No. 3 by George Walker, the first African-American laureate of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, whose centennial falls this year. The concert concludes with James V. Cockerham’s Fantasia on “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a signature piece for the ensemble, whose distinguished members hail from the foremost orchestras and conservatory teaching faculties nationwide. 

For its Carnegie Hall debut, the orchestra’s program showcases these works along with the world premiere of a new Gateways commission from 2021-22 Carnegie Hall “Perspectives” artist Jon Batiste, the Oscar-winning, Grammy-nominated music director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  The Batiste commission is funded, in part, by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music in celebration of the School’s 100th anniversary and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Rochester’s WXXI Public Media and New York City’s WQXR will serve as media sponsors for the seven-day festival.  The full schedule appears below and further details are available here.

The American Rescue Plan was signed into law in March 2021 when the NEA was provided $135 million for the arts sector. The funding for organizations is the third installment providing more than $57.7 million for arts organizations. In April 2021, the NEA announced $52 million (40 percent) in ARP funding would be allocated to 62 state, jurisdictional, and regional arts organizations for regranting through their respective programs. The second installment in November 2021 allocated $20.2 million to 66 local arts agencies for subgranting to local artists and art organizations.

For more information on the NEA’s American Rescue Plan grants, including the full list of arts organizations funded in this announcement, visit www.arts.gov/COVID-19/the-american-rescue-plan.