Arts groups innovate to battle COVID-caused revenue downturn

Naia Kete, like so many musicians, had her life turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Almost overnight, Kete’s busy schedule of concerts as a solo artist and with her reggae band Say Real was canceled, eliminating her primary source of income. So when she was approached by Artists at Work, a new initiative that puts artists on a payroll to create and launch programs in their communities, Kete jumped at the chance.

“Just the idea that there’s an organization that’s fighting on behalf of getting artists a living wage was something that I wanted to be a part of,” she said. “Just valuing art in that way felt like it was unheard of.”

The arts and culture industries have been battered during the past 21 months as organizations furloughed staff, canceled shows and slashed budgets to weather the pandemic. While Americans as a whole donated more to charity last year, a record $471.4 billion according to a report from Giving USA, nonprofit arts organizations saw a decline.

It's not yet clear whether arts donations stabilized in 2021, but different initiatives have been launched to help both artists and arts institutions.

Live theater and orchestra concerts sponsored by nonprofits around the country, as well as high-profile, for-profit shows on Broadway, have been postponed as COVID-19 infections surge due to the omicron variant. If cancellations run rampant in coming weeks, it could deal another blow to nonprofit arts organizations that, as of July, had lost nearly $18 billion in revenue during the pandemic, according to the latest estimate by Americans for the Arts. About half a billion of lost revenue was due to canceled events.

Harlem’s famed Apollo Theater reopened in August for its first public event since the pandemic shut it down last year, forcing it to furlough...