The first Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts was big news. Governor Raymond Shafer flew in by helicopter to open the festival, landing on Old Main lawn. Banners flew, artists in action showed their skills, and crowds enjoyed theater performances, films, and local bands. WPSX did live festival broadcasts.
And yet, the festival clearly was a work in progress. The Sidewalk Sale started slowly and grew day by day, as more and more artists saw what was happening and grabbed their own free display spots on tacked-up snow fencing. Someone even sold kittens. When darkness was falling on an Allen Street performance by the Nittany Knights, someone ran into McLanahan’s and bought spotlights.
The 50th festival this July 13 to 17 celebrates five decades of growth, evolution, and impact. Today, each year’s festival attracts an estimated 150,000 visitors who fill area hotels, dine in local restaurants, and shop in local stores, in addition to purchasing works of art at the Sidewalk Sale & Exhibition. In both 2013 and 2015, Sunshine Artist magazine named the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts the top Fine art and Design Show in the country. Meanwhile, for many State College area families, Arts Festival has evolved into an annual tradition of hosting out-of-town art-loving friends, shopping among 300 artist booths, and enjoying the atmosphere of an event that brings together the entire community.
Bringing shoppers downtown
The festival was the brainchild of Wally Lloyd, who was president of the State College Area Chamber of Commerce in the mid-1960s, and other downtown businesspeople. Fifty years ago, Penn State had few summer classes, and the town emptied out during warmer months even more than it does now; plus, new shopping centers were starting to lure shoppers away from downtown.
“It was a slower time for business, and they thought this would be a good time to have a lot of people come into town to visit the shops and see the artwork,” says Catherine Kresge, whose husband, Guy, helped organize the first festival.
In January 1967, in the days long before e-mail, Lloyd typed a letter to Gary Moyer, chairman of the Downtown Merchants Association, formalizing an idea he had floated a few months earlier.
“A successful festival of this kind should be fun for all,” he wrote. “It would give publicity to State College, many people would come to town because of it and hence business activity should be high. Further, it could do much to create a favorable image of the business community in the minds of the local citizens and University students.”
By April, planning had advanced to the point where Lloyd wrote to Jules Heller, dean of Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, asking that the university work with the business community to kick off the festival in July.
“One thing is certain, the University could hold an arts festival without any help from the town or Chamber of Commerce; I don’t believe the reverse is very likely,” Lloyd wrote. “However, I do feel that the best possible festival would result from a cooperative effort.”
Lloyd’s widow, Patricia Lloyd, recalls that first festival as a “massive project” that entailed many kitchen-table meetings among her husband and organizers, including Kresge and Jim DeTuerk. “Almost everything had to be done by volunteers,” she says. “There wasn’t any money.”
“We didn’t have any budget,” Lloyd recalled in 1991 as the 25th festival approached. “I just opened accounts at hardware stores and lumberyards and kept hoping we’d have enough money to do this. I think we were barely able to pay all the bills.”
Committee member Marie Doll notes, “We made some strange decisions. One of the strangest was that it was two weekends and the whole week in between.”
Artists came and went during the nine days, depending on when they needed to be at their regular jobs.
Still, the first festival was an undisputed success. At the close of the festivities, Heller announced, “This year, we only scratched the surface. In years to come, when people want to know what is going on in all the arts, they will come to Central Pennsylvania to find out.”
Planning began right away for the second festival. Wally and Patricia Lloyd spent the rest of the summer driving to festivals as far away as New England to see how they operated. Someone learned that the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which had been formed in 1966, was giving grants, and an application resulted in a contribution of $5,000. Local businesses and individual donors helped to support the costs.
Problems & solutions
The festival continued to grow each year. In 1971, the Sidewalk Sale & Exhibition became a juried show, meaning would-be exhibitors had to submit information about their artwork so that jurors could decide who would participate.
“That caused quite a ruckus because some of the people who had been in every year didn’t get in,” says Doll, who chaired that first juried sale with her husband, Clyde.
Over the years, major problems occasionally arose, but often those difficulties brought positive change, says Lurene Frantz, managing director from 1978 to 1987. One year, a Teamsters strike on campus left festival organizers scrambling to move the entertainment tent from Old Main lawn to a fraternity, and about 400 artist booths from campus to downtown streets.
“That’s when we realized we could have half the booths downtown,” Frantz says. “Out of that trauma, we learned so much.”
Another year, a surge in visitors resulted in more trash piling up than the borough’s professional crews could keep up with. The festival quickly organized a supplementary volunteer trash crew that remains a vital cog in the festival today, even as the focus has shifted to recycling as much waste as possible.
By the early 1980s, the festival was a much-awaited event on the region’s annual calendar, yet it still had just one part-time staff member, no office, and not much of a plan for raising the money to pay for the festival, says Karen Shute, who became the event’s treasurer around that time. Selling T-shirts, raffle tickets, and program ads were among the primary ways to raise funds.
“Frankly, I don’t even know how we pulled it off,” says Shute, who set up a budget and organized a business advisory committee. A temporary rental near Moyer Jewelers became the first office, originally just during the festival and then evolving to year-round space above what is now Growing Tree and finally to the current longtime office in the Towers on South Allen Street.
In 1991, two major changes were introduced to boost festival finances. New director Phil Waltz had learned that First Night Boston sold buttons as “tickets” to performances at the multi-venue event. Arts Festival venues were mostly outdoors, making it impossible to control entry, but the committee decided to sell supporter buttons for $1 each. Linda Gall, who chaired the button committee, remembers walking around Old Main lawn with a basketful of buttons, explaining to visitors why it was a good idea to buy one.
“Our goal was to sell 20,000 buttons,” she says. “We did not even come close. People had no sense that they had to help pay for the festival.”
Still, the concept took hold, and today visitors buy $10 buttons to gain entry to venues such as the State Theatre and to support the festival in general.
Also in 1991, the festival outsourced publication of the program, with Mimi Barash Coppersmith’s Town&Gown winning the bid. Today, Town&Gown continues to produce the program, which has contributed more than $300,000 in ad revenue to the festival over the years.
In December 1994, First Night State College introduced another major annual event for the community while helping to secure the financial stability of Arts Festival, Gall says. Until then, the festival had to pay year-round for resources such as staff and office space to handle one summer festival. The introduction of a winter event enabled consistent use of resources and added a second revenue stream.
50 years of growth
Today, elements of the early festivals continue, while new traditions also have taken hold. The banner competition that started the first year now encompasses hundreds of colorful banners. Lanny Sommese designed the first Arts Festival poster in 1974, and more than 1,750 free copies are now distributed each year.
The Arts Festival races, begun in 1975, are still going strong in the July heat, with added children’s races and a return to the original 10-miler as an option, in addition to 5K and 10K races. Children & Youth Day, which officially began in 1976, is now an annual highlight for budding artists who sell their work and for the young shoppers eager to spend their allowance money.
Although the first block of Allen Street has always been pedestrian-only during the festival, landscaping that began with little more than a few purchased flower pots has grown into a professionally designed streetscape, featuring overhead dumping buckets of water that are perennial favorites among the youngest festival visitors. Advances in technology mean that artists submit work samples digitally to the Sidewalk Sale & Exhibition jurors, rather than on slides that had to be loaded onto carousels. An Arts Festival app allows visitors to access schedules, maps, and real-time information on their smartphones. A year-round paid staff of three plus about 500 volunteers work together with area businesses, the university, other nonprofit organizations, artists, and performers to put on a highly regarded festival each summer.
“We have great partnerships with the Borough of State College and Penn State for this signature event of the region,” says Rick Bryant, who has been festival director since 2005. “We are looking forward to 50 more wonderful years.”
