Thirty years ago, Diane Maurer-Mathison packed her car full of hand-marbled papers, scarves, and her other works of art and drove to State College from Philadelphia. Maurer-Mathison, a mixed media artist, was exhibiting her pieces at the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. She had no idea that displaying her work at the festival would change her life significantly
“When I drove here to deliver my work to the show, I fell in love with the area,” she says about why she relocated to Spring Mills, where she’s lived for the past 27 years. “And having a booth at the festival [every year since] has led to several local and national magazine articles about my work, including a photo spread in Country Living magazine. An invitation to demonstrate my paper marbling in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution also came from being seen demonstrating at the festival. I have met many of the artists whom I have featured in the art books I have written there, and a number of galleries have also asked to show my work after they saw it at the festival.”
Each July, the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts draws a crowd of more than 125,000 attendees to downtown State College and Penn State’s University Park campus. Since the festival began in 1967, its impact on artists and the arts scene in Centre County goes beyond those five days in July.
Even within those days in July, the festival’s impact is felt beyond downtown State College and the Penn State campus. According to executive director Rick Bryant, the festival has been the basis for the creation of the People’s Choice Festival in Boalsburg, Heritage Days in Philipsburg, and Lemont Fest in Lemont — each of which runs during the same week as the Arts Festival.
The People’s Choice Festival, held on the grounds of the Pennsylvania Military Museum in Boalsburg, started in 1993 and now attracts more than 110,000 visitors each year. It has nearly 200 artists, two dozen food vendors, and 40 acts on two stages.
In Philipsburg, members of the town’s bicentennial committee wanted to hold an annual event that would take place at the same time as the Arts Festival and would bring more attention to the community. The group started the Philipsburg Heritage Days in 1998. Each year, the committee picks a theme centered around their town’s history or people. Attendance is estimated at about 15,000 each year for the five-day event.
Lemont is home to the newest jubilee, Lemont Fest, an emerging arts festival that began in 2015. Hosted by the Lemont Village Association, the festival takes place in the Granary and on the Lemont Village Green and is another opportunity for local artists, musicians, and food vendors to showcase their creativity. About 25 artists sell their wares at Lemont Fest, while local restaurants bring food and beers. Proceeds benefit the Lemont Village Association’s Granary Project.
Beyond that week of festivals in July, the Arts Festival has been a force in creating several artistic organizations in the area and has simply enhanced the region’s arts scene.
Marie Doll, executive director of the Art Alliance of Central Pennsylvania, a nonprofit organization serving students, artists, and the art-loving public in the area, says that some of the same people that supported the first festival envisioned having a nonprofit organization in the area to promote the arts year-round, and they founded the Art Alliance in 1968.
“Arts Fest was absolutely responsible for the Art Alliance,” Doll says. “It brought these people together to talk, get to know one another, and create a plan together and implement it in order to promote art in our community.”
The Art Alliance, located in Lemont, offers a variety of art classes for children and adults and are taught by local artists. Additionally, it holds several exhibits during the year, giving novice artists and professional artists alike an opportunity to show their work, and community members a chance to view and appreciate the visual arts.
Amy Frank, founder and owner of the Makery, an arts and crafts studio in State College that specializes in creative classes, parties, and events and also has a marketplace for local artists, says the Arts Festival is a wonderful event for the arts scene in State College.
“It gives us that creative artistic element every year that reminds us just how important our community is. We have all this creativity happening in State College year-round, and this reminds us about what’s going on,” she says. “We’re trying to do that at the Makery — create this celebration of the arts in State College every day.”
While the Makery first opened its doors in Boalsburg, Frank says she wanted to move to downtown State College, where she says that arts are really thriving, and closer to galleries such as the Frasier Street Gallery and the Douglas Albert Gallery. She also wanted to be a part of First Friday events in downtown State College that feature art, music, and various forms of entertainment. She says that while the Arts Festival reminds people that State College has a thriving arts scene, as the years go by, it’s more evident that the arts play a large role in the community, not just during the week of the festival.
Bigger venues for the visual arts also have opened up since the first Arts Festival, namely the Palmer Museum of Art, which opened as the Museum of Art in 1972. It has gone through renovations and expansions in 1993 and 2002, and it now has 11 galleries, a print study room, a 150-seat auditorium, a garden for large-scale contemporary sculptures, and more.
The Bellefonte Art Museum is celebrating its ninth year as an arts institution, and it has several galleries, a children’s creativity center, and more.
It isn’t just about the fine arts, either, when it comes to the impact of the Arts Festival. Every day during the festival, a variety of musical acts can be seen and heard at various venues. From jazz to bluegrass to country to rock, music is a big part of the festival — and the local music scene has grown and become a bigger part of Happy Valley.
In 1967, a small group of local musicians got together to perform at the first Arts Festival. Business owners, professors, retirees, students, physicians, and homemakers formed the Nittany Valley Symphony.
Diane Toulson, a flutist for the symphony, was a founding member of the group. She says the group, originally called the Music Guild, performed at the first Arts Festival on the recital hall stage. The Music Guild was a small group playing classical chamber music. By the end of the performance, the group had already decided to form a local symphony orchestra.
“I think the educated people of this town know and appreciate what classical music does for community members, namely it makes us calm in spirit and serves as a form of therapy,” Toulson says. “Once we became a symphony, we started performing on the steps of Old Main each year. It was a pops concert of show tunes and more, and we always drew a huge crowd.”
She says the group also performed in Schwab Auditorium several times during past festivals, and attendance was always high. While the symphony no longer performs at the festival, these days it’s popular enough to stand on its own, performing its season’s worth of concerts in Eisenhower Auditorium.
Since the first festival, the chamber and classical music scene in Happy Valley has grown to include Pennsylvania Centre Orchestra, which celebrated its 25th anniversary season last year, and the Music at Penn’s Wood concert series that went from 1986 to 2002 and then was reinstated in 2008 after budget cuts had suspended the series.
Another musical group that had its start at the Arts Festival is the State College Area Municipal Band, which first performed at the 1976 Arts Festival, according to its records. Each year, the band has concerts celebrating Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Veterans Day, and it still plays at the Arts Festival (it will perform 11 a.m. July 16 at the Festival Shell on Old Main lawn this year).
The music scene, besides the local acts that have emerged, has seen the JazzPA Summer Jazz Celebration in Bellefonte (the event is taking this year off) and Summer’s Best Music Fest, which this year expanded to a two-day event.
The theater scene also has grown since the Arts Festival began. Students from Penn State’s musical theater program will perform several times during this year’s festival, and other local theater groups have scheduled performances during the same time as Arts Festival, including Nittany Theatre at the Barn with its production of All Shook Up at the Boal Barn Playhouse.
“Even though Arts Fest puts more of a focus on fine arts and music, it’s great because anytime the arts gets attention, it benefits all the arts,” says Richard Biever, producing artistic director of Fuse productions in State College. “I’d love to see even more theater produced during Arts Fest, maybe more adventuresome pieces that aren’t done during the regular season.”
Biever, who had been the executive director of the State Theatre in 2012, started Fuse in 2013. Last year, Fuse had a production of Les Miserables at Eisenhower Auditorium, and in June, it had a successful two-week run of My Fair Lady at the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center.
Speaking of the State Theatre, after being closed for several years, it reopened in 2006 and shows movies and hosts performances of all kinds, including during the Arts Festival.
As it prepares to celebrates its 50th edition, the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts also can celebrate the fact that it has helped create a thriving arts scene in Happy Valley.
“Art is an important part of everyone’s life,” Doll says. “There’s a famous quote, ‘Art helps explain the world to us,’ and I think it’s just so true! It’s just so important to make art available to the public, and the Arts Fest does that.”
