#Project BeethoVAN

Rushmore Music Festival Secures Major Public Funding to Complete Project BeethoVAN

First-ever National Endowment for the Arts grant joins state and local support to complete Rushmore Music Festival’s mobile stage and expand free music programming across South Dakota

RAPID CITY, S.D. — September 2026 — Rushmore Music Festival has received a combined $37,000 in new federal, state, and local arts funding to support Project BeethoVAN, the Festival’s innovative mobile concert stage and community outreach initiative.

The new awards include the Festival’s first-ever grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, totaling $25,000, along with an $8,000 grant from the South Dakota Arts Council and $4,000 in support from the Rapid City Arts Council and City of Rapid City.

Together, these awards mark an important milestone for Rushmore Music Festival and provide the funding necessary to bring Project BeethoVAN to completion following an initial $100,000 investment from the Ludwick Family Foundation.

“Project BeethoVAN began with a simple idea: classical music should not be confined to a concert hall,” said Dr. Katie Smirnova, Executive Director and Co-Founder of Rushmore Music Festival. “We wanted to bring live music directly into our community — to give a child the chance to hear a live string quartet for the first time, and to reach families, seniors, veterans, and communities where opportunities to experience classical music may be limited. To see that vision now embraced through private, local, state, and federal support is incredibly inspiring. It tells us that this work matters.”

The Festival’s goal is straightforward: access to exceptional music should not depend on where someone lives, what they earn, or whether they can purchase a concert ticket.

“Receiving our first National Endowment for the Arts grant is an extraordinary milestone for our organization,” Smirnova said. “We are deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, the South Dakota Arts Council, the Rapid City Arts Council, the City of Rapid City, the Ludwick Family Foundation, and every community partner who believed that this project was worth building.”

With Project BeethoVAN nearing completion, Rushmore Music Festival plans to continue expanding free concerts, school programs, workshops, and community partnerships throughout Rapid City, the Black Hills, and rural South Dakota.

A Concert Hall That Travels

Conceived in response to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, Project BeethoVAN has developed into one of Rushmore Music Festival’s largest community initiatives.

At the center of the project is a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter passenger van paired with a custom-engineered 16-foot mobile stage trailer, allowing Festival musicians to bring concerts, workshops, and educational programs directly to schools, neighborhoods, community organizations, parks, and rural communities.

Development of the mobile stage has included a multi-year collaboration with engineering students at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, who have worked on engineering challenges including the stage structure, sound shell, storage, and safety systems. At the heart of the mobile stage is a baby grand piano, specially retrofitted for traveling performances and hand-painted by Rapid City artist and illustrator Robert Bennett.

The Final Stage of Project BeethoVAN

With the latest round of funding secured, Rushmore Music Festival is now moving into the final phase of the project. One of the most visible finishing touches will be a complete vinyl graphic wrap for the mobile stage trailer, transforming it into a recognizable traveling symbol of Project BeethoVAN throughout Rapid City and beyond.

Rushmore Music Festival is partnering with Rapid City artist Bonny Fleming, who will create the original artwork and graphic concept for the trailer. The Festival will then work with Ross Johnson Design Company to bring the design into its final production and installation.

The unveiling will mark the culmination of five years of imagination, engineering, artistry, collaboration, and community investment in Project BeethoVAN. What began as an ambitious idea will finally take the road in its completed form: a traveling stage unlike anything else in the region, built in South Dakota and created to carry the extraordinary experience of live music to people wherever they are. No concert hall. No tickets. No boundaries.

Twelve Years of Building Access to Music in the Black Hills

Project BeethoVAN is part of the broader work of the Rushmore Music Festival, a nonprofit organization now entering its 13th season in the Black Hills. What began as a small, two-week program for local young musicians in Spearfish, SD, has grown into a six-week residential summer music festival drawing students and professional faculty artists to South Dakota from across the United States and abroad.

Today, the Festival operates residential educational programs for young musicians, presents professional concerts, provides scholarships, and produces year-round community and educational programming. After six years in residence on a university campus, Rushmore Music Festival established its own 17-acre campus in the Black Hills, with student and faculty housing and dedicated spaces for teaching, practicing, rehearsing, and performing. The campus has allowed the organization to build a permanent home for its educational mission while expanding the scope of its community programming.

“Rushmore Music Festival has always been about much more than the concerts that happen during six weeks in the summer,” said Smirnova. “We have spent twelve years building something that belongs to this community — bringing musicians here, educating young people here, creating partnerships here, and finding new ways to make music accessible throughout the Black Hills and across South Dakota.”

The Festival views the recent grants as both an investment in Project BeethoVAN and recognition of the organization’s growing role in South Dakota’s cultural landscape.

You can support Project BeethoVAN and the Rushmore Music Festival by becoming part of the community that makes our mission possible — whether by becoming a volunteer or through financial contributions to the scholarship fund, operations fund, or endowment held by the South Dakota Community Foundation.