National Arts Awards 2022: Robert F. Smith

Robert Frederick Smith is a visionary and someone who's really setting an example for our greater society, where every young person has a similar opportunity without regard to their zip code, their skin tone, their heritage. But he says part of his philanthropy, the core of it, comes from wanting to see joy, to see people experience joy in their life. This is my class 2019. I was really impressed when I learned about his gift to Morehouse College. And my family is making a grant to eliminate their student loans. This was something he did of the moment. It went around the world. It took the world by storm, and quite rightly so. Sphinx Organization, for the past 25 years, has been working to diversify the field of classical music, to create on-ramps for talented young black and brown youth, all with the aim and the vision of fortifying the pipeline and really changing the face and the soul of classical music. Each instrument truly has its own soul and its own voice. For someone like Sterling Elliott, Robert Smith's support has been transformational and just really unbelievable. This instrument is a Gennaro Gagliano cello. It's breathtaking to perform on this instrument, even from the very first notes when I played on it in the shop. And so when I found out that this instrument, I could call my own and found out that Mr. Smith was the one responsible for the help. It was just such a joy. Her name is Ginger. He's very centrally involved with our national youth ensembles. They're the finest 16 to 19-year-olds in the country, and they're amazing. So we decided to create MYO II, which was a younger orchestra. And now it's transforming the picture of diversity in MYO, but also then onto music colleges and ultimately onto orchestras all around America. We were able to create education programs where we can bring the archives to classrooms and have students K-12 do their own research and create new works. All of it is because of the gift from the Frontier Foundation, from Robert Smith, that allowed us to make our program soar. He's very deeply engaged with the sort of society we all want to live in. He's very deeply engaged with how do you give everybody opportunities to fulfill their talent. I hope that one day we can just have diversity be sort of be a standard as opposed to something to reach and a goal to have, but already be a foundation. And the role that Robert Smith has played in really identifying this issue as a priority and really enhancing and augmenting its importance is something that I don't think will ever be forgotten.