Edited by Vilma Shu
3 Dots Downtown is a nonprofit with a mission to inspire a more vibrant community by elevating the humanities, promoting local arts, cultivating innovative experiences and offering an inclusive public space for civic engagement. Through various programming, special events and art exhibitions, 3 Dots Downtown hopes to build an inclusive public space for community members to connect through the arts and humanities and share ideas about how to make Centre County a more culturally vibrant place to live, work and play.
3 Dots Downtown Executive Director Erica Quinn is an artist and educator who stepped into the role in April 2021 to help build partnerships in the community and increase funding for the organization to grow.
Originally from White Haven, Quinn graduated from Juniata College in 2010 with a bachelor of arts degree in photography and literature. She earned her master of fine arts degree in photography from New York City’s Pratt Institute in 2013.
Town&Gown founder Mimi Barash Coppersmith sat down with Quinn via Zoom to discuss the types of programming that are available at 3 Dots Downtown, funding for the organization and what it hopes to accomplish in State College.
Mimi: I’ve visited 3 Dots, and it’s an unusual place, but I’m willing to guess that our readers don’t know a whole lot about it. Let’s talk about your connections. What makes 3 Dots possible? How are you financed?
Erica: We started with a three-year runway grant from the Knight Foundation and private philanthropy within the community, but that ran out at the end of 2021. Now we’ve thought more about how we can get invested with different folks in the community for donor support, in addition to very generous support from the Borough of State College. We also do a fair amount of grant writing, so we have recently received a PA Humanities Council grant for justice and equities programming in the humanities. So, funding is multi-layered.
Mimi: Who’s the boss?
Erica: We have a board of directors. They’re an independent governing body because we’re a nonprofit. They oversee the organization, and I work in concert with them.
Mimi: It came about with the help of the Centre Foundation?
Erica: Yeah, so the Centre Foundation is part of how we were stewarded, the original philanthropy grants, and so we have ongoing support through that.
Mimi: So, how do you intend to carry on financially?
Erica: That’s a good question. Part of what I’m here to do is to meet with people in the community to raise support for the organization and to find folks whose vision of what a community should be, what arts stewardship and community building should be, and then find people who want to contribute to that cause in State College.
One of the things about 3 Dots is we have a non-hierarchical kind of leadership, so I’m the executive director. However, I always say that everything is community-built, community-minded, and community-informed. As I’m making decisions about things, I’m making them in concert with our board, a team of folks we have at our core, including Spud Marshall, the innovation director and co-founder of 3 Dots, and the community. We want to find out from folks in the community what you want to see? What does a creative, inclusive, invested, dynamic community look like to you? And then how can we use this as a platform to manifest that and bring it into reality here?
Mimi: Explain to our readers the type of formal events you conduct, so they have an idea of the kind of service you’re supplying to us.
Erica: We’re an arts organization. We often support an alternative arts scene and work with many different groups. We want people to have an unexpected arts or humanities experience. We want them to be sitting on the patio eating their lunch underneath our mural by Ann Tarantino and have an arts experience. So, we’re all about meeting people where they are and inviting them, helping them with that threshold crossing.
Mimi: How do you build traffic for that?
Erica: When we reopened in June—we were closed for fifteen months during the pandemic—we started with a weekly series called Tuesday on the Terrace. So that was a celebratory weekly community block party. We had food, music, community partners, and visual art every single week. It was different every single time, and from before the pandemic, we had about a thousand people coming in every month. After we reopened our doors, that number tripled, and we started having more than 3,000 every month.
Mimi: Maybe it could be called an escape.
Erica: Absolutely. Part of it, I mentioned the mural by Ann Tarantino. It’s called You Are Here, so it’s kind of a meditation on belonging. It’s upside down on our patio ceiling, and it’s above our front door, and we had envisioned it as this portal. It’s a sign to you that you’re welcome and that you’re going to have a different kind of transformative experience when you walk in through these doors.
We really serve as a second home for lots of folks. We’re an open public space. We have restrooms and water fountains. We’re inclusive about who comes in and out during our open hours. Part of what we try to do is connect folks with resources that are helpful to them. We want to be inclusive and welcoming to all.
Mimi: Tell me the spirit of a person who leaves a very safe and important job and accepts a job in the community about which she knows very little but has a sense about what it might be. How’d you get over that ramp?
Erica: That’s a great question. When I was making that decision, it was a real question for me. I had a good thing going, and I was teaching in Germany every semester. I loved my students, and it was very stable. Part of it was a friend, Chris Faroe, who runs a collective group called the Creative Mapping Project. At the time, I was doing these kinds of workshops with him, talking about core values. Before this job posting even came about, I was doing a lot of volunteer community work. I was head of programming for the Huntingdon County Arts Council for about seven years. I was on the board of Huntingdon House, where I still am. I was on the school board; I don’t have children.
I was doing all these different things, and then I moved to State College, and it felt like a vacuum in terms of that engagement and involvement. I started doing this introspective journaling about the things I find important, collaboration and humility-based means of engaging in the community, a collective experience building, and this job came about. It just felt like such good timing, and at that time, I was considering relocating to other cities because I wasn’t sure where I wanted to live. It just turns out that there is so much richness here that I was only scraping the surface.
Mimi: What’s the best thing you’ve done so far at 3 Dots, in your mind?
Erica: We’ve had so many things that stand out for me, things that felt meaningful. I believe you visited during the Molok exhibit. That’s a great example for a lot of reasons, and it came about in this really organic way. The whole thing is a great illustration of what this community can do because I happened to be at Rhoneymeade fest, organized by Gorinto Productions, an initiative by local arts programmer Corey Elbin. It’s an all-day experimental music festival held at Rhoneymeade. I was talking with James Kalsbeek, whom I previously worked with, who runs The Workshop in Centre Hall, and he had said that he had this Molok installation which I was familiar with and really loved the project. He needed to find a place for it to go so that he could do another piece of programming, and I got really excited because I was like, I have a place for it to go. What started as this very happenstance meeting turned into this foundational exhibit for our community.
So, the Molok, as you know, is this exhibit that’s really based on community input. The premise is that the monster feeds on the memory of once loved but now disregarded objects. The puppet is thirteen feet long and is fully immersive, comprised of all donated objects, most of them from folks in Centre County. Over the course of the exhibit here, different community members are invited to come in and contribute their own objects, and it became part of that narrative.
One of the coolest things about that was how people responded to it in these very emotional ways. We had people in their 90s having the same connection as this little girl who was eight who came back every week and talked to me about it every week. We hosted at the end of the tenure of the exhibit a set of three performances written specifically for the space and for the community, which engaged local puppeteers, volunteers, actors, sound designers, lighting design, and so it became this truly organic community expression. Because of that, the next weekend, the Molok started to travel. It’s going to have tenure at Rhoneymeade. It will also move on to folks in Altoona, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh.
Mimi: Tell our readers about how the grant from the PA Humanities Council supports 3 Dots.
Erica: We were really grateful to get funding support from the PA Humanities Council. A big part of the work we do here is based in justice and equity programming. We wrote programming specific to support hiring an assistant director to help oversee this programming and underwrite justice and equity programming in the community. We’re already working with a global poetry group that will start happening on Saturdays. We’re talking with the Centre LGBTQ+ support network. The more we can get government agencies and individual donors to help underwrite essential programming in the community, the more awesome we can do. We have so many people here who are ready to do it.
Mimi: If you had your druthers, what do you need to bring 3 Dots to a new level, other than money?
Erica: One thing that is in our longer-term planning is thinking about a building because the building we’re in currently will not always be with us. I get a lot of inspiration from visiting other regional arts leaders, seeing other spaces, and projecting where we could be in 10 or 20 years. I think about how much I would love to have a studio program, a residency program, and an arts education program. Those kinds of things require a different set of facilities. They require a classroom with a sink. They require different kinds of studio spaces in which artists could be in residence. That, along with money, but more importantly, is this increased relationship building in the community.
Mimi: What else can you think of to give you greater dimension?
Erica: What I would love to do, and with this comes increased donor support, is the Cultural Catalyst Program, where donors contribute between five and ten thousand dollars a year, which helps underwrite programming directly. For instance, we had one donor who was very passionate about LGBTQ+ issues. Because of that, when we had the Centre LGBTQ+ Support Network come to us to ask about doing youth programming, we had this person underwrite that programming. What I would love to have is the ability to do that more.
We’re a young organization. I think we have a lot of promise. We could do incredible things, but I think we’re young also in terms of connecting with the donor support network. I would love to see the space to be barrier-free community programming for groups doing that work in the community. My vision is to have the money come from elsewhere to make important experiences happen for folks in the community.
Mimi: Well, you have to design the plan and develop the various levels.
Erica: We’re adding a new monthly Sustainers program this year, which will be nice. The monthly Sustainers program for folks, like a lower level at $250 and below of annual contributions. It’s for people who use our programming and want to help support it, and so trying to meet donors at various levels wherever they are. We also have our Trustees program. That’s been part of us from the beginning. Those folks donate a hundred dollars a month and sit on the council that oversees our granting program because we give out thousand-dollar grants every month.
Mimi: Who do they go to?
Erica: People in the community who have a creative idea for improving the community. So, they’re always tied to these direct-impact, tangible creative projects somewhere in Centre County.
Mimi: Can you give us examples of some of those successful ones?
Erica: Last year, we awarded a thousand-dollar grant to a program by Tierra Williams and Pablo Lopez called Black Tea, a film project where people of color in the community were interviewed, describing their experiences within the community, and starting this conversation. That’s resulted in some public programming that’s been interesting and significant. We also have funded things like Music Takes Flight, a project out at the Bernel Park by the airport. The wild geese mural by William Snyder on the side of Webster’s is also one of those thousand-dollar grant projects.
Mimi: What are some upcoming programming and collaborations?
Erica: We are starting a new program called Tuesday Defrost, which will always have an open mic, and then we’ll also include programming like a featured activity. Sometimes that will be a featured musician or set of musicians. We’re working with a meditation teacher. We’re working with the Downtown Improvement District. I’d love to do a pop-up city hall. We will also start up with our Tuesdays on the Terrace series, which is the weekly community block party, beginning in April. Every Saturday until the end of the semester, we will have a world poetry workshop. We’re starting a new series of songwriting workshops and songwriting showcases beginning in April.
Mimi: Thank you for taking the time to share some very interesting possibilities in this community and having the challenge of leading that parade. I hope you march with the flag in your navel, and you have a wonderful time.
Erica: Thank you so much. What an honor to be asked to do this.
