Pharrell Williams made his debut at the Apollo Theater less than five months ago, and now he’s taking a seat in the Apollo’s boardroom. On Tuesday, the Harlem theater announced that Mr. Williams, along with five corporate leaders, would join the theater’s board of directors, expanding its membership to 32.
Among the board’s main projects at the moment is raising $20 million for its 21st Century Apollo Campaign, to support programming and education and update the theater’s facilities. So far about $11 million has been raised, a spokeswoman for the theater said.
The technical upgrade includes digital technologies meant to help the Apollo reach audiences around the world. Mr. Williams’s concert, in June, demonstrated the potential for that global reach: it was streamed live, in a production directed for the Internet by Spike Lee, as part of “Unstaged,” a series sponsored by American Express. (Videos from the evening are archived online.)
“The Apollo Theater embodies a tremendous amount of music history,” Mr. Williams said in a statement, adding that he was “so excited to help preserve, and expand, its legacy in American culture.”
The other new board members are Robert Kraft, chairman of the Kraft Group; Jason L. Matthews, a managing director at Goldman Sachs; Carolyn Minick Mason, a labor and employment lawyer; Charles Phillips, the chief executive of Infor, a software company; and Bronson van Wyck, an event planner.
The board’s chairman is Richard D. Parsons, the former chief executive of Time Warner and chairman of Citigroup (and currently the interim chief executive of the Los Angeles Clippers).
An earlier version of this post misstated the name of a fundraising effort at the Apollo Theater. It is the 21st Century Apollo Campaign, not the 21st Century Apollo Fund.