Live Mural Exhibition – NEW 2026
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the arts is pleased to present a Live Mural Exhibition commemorating the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
Live Mural Exhibition: Dreaming American Futures is a celebrational juried LIVE PRODUCTION Mural Exhibition taking place during the 5-day Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts.
Designs are based on the overarching theme of Dreaming American Futures and the following, closing excerpt from the poem The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman.
When day comes, we step out of the shade
aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.
The poem, in its entirety, can be read here: https://einhorncollaborative.org/the-hill-we-climb/
Five artists have been selected to participate in this inaugural event.
Scott Kowalski
An Altoona, PA native, Scott now works out of a studio in Pittsburgh, PA. Most of his work comes from trying to understand the tension between calm and chaos in himself. He is not interested in resolving it as much as sitting inside it.
Scott’s work moves between minimalism and abstract expressionism, using both as a way to hold that push and pull. He primarily paints with acrylic on canvas, building bold, vague, and vibrant forms that feel more like fragments than finished statements.
Alongside studio work, Scott explores public art as a physical extension of that process—bringing the same internal tension into shared space, where it can live out in the open and interact with a broader community.
Scott states he is “chasing moments of stillness, but not by avoiding the noise”. The complexity, the emotion, the mess of it all—that’s the material. The work is just his way of staying with it long enough to see what shows up.
Elody Gyekis
Elody Gyekis is a Pennsylvania-based artist whose paintings and mixed-media artworks revolve around nature, mythology, the human form, and gender. She earned her BFA at Penn State University and her MFA at the New York Academy of Art. She has had solo shows in Pennsylvania and New York, and been in group shows across the USA, Central America and Europe. Elody has completed residencies in Romania and France and has taught classes and workshops in the USA and Central America. She also organizes and designs many community murals and other large-scale public art projects. Currently, she is on the Continuing Education Faculty for the New York Academy of Art where she teaches online classes and workshops on painting and drawing.
Elody is in the process of building an artist’s retreat and residency center called “Sirona Falls” at her home in Rosecrans, Pennsylvania. On the edge of a large tract of protected land, it is surrounded by forest, streams, waterfalls, wetlands, fields and a lake, diverse and healthy ecosystems inhabited many wonderful native plants and animals and will be an ideal environment for creativity and art education.
Kate Murphy – Art At Beechwood Designs
Kate Murphy is a self taught painter who finds inspiration in the surreal, international folk art, and folklore. After a health scare with a brain tumor, she decided to return to central Pennsylvania and to school to pursue her passion in the arts at Bloomsburg University. She resides in her hometown of Lewisburg with the love of her life, her chubby pitbull, Noah.
Jennifer Lonsky / Ruben Rosado – Pink Sky Designs
Jennifer Lonsky and Ruben Rosado are two artists that have come together to form their own business, Pink Sky Designs, which has allowed them to combine their strongest individual creative skills to produce artwork together professionally in multiple mediums. Since forming Pink Sky, they have been fortunate enough to explore painting and designing murals, offering watercolor portraits of pets, people and events and recently branched out into teaching watercolor workshops. Jen graduated with a BFA with a concentration in Illustration from The College of New Jersey and currently lives in Lake Hopatcong, NJ. Ruben is from Union Beach, NJ and is a graduate of Rutgers University with a BFA with a concentration in Painting. Aside from pursuing new artistic opportunities, Lonsky likes to play basketball and run around playgrounds with her four children. When not putting together proposals for new projects, Rosado enjoys spending quality time, mostly outdoors, with his two teenage children. Pink Sky is extremely excited to be participating in the Central PA Mural Festival and are really looking forward to being a part of the creative energy this event brings.
Margalo Guo
Margalo Guo is a muralist working in New York and Pennsylvania. A former Penn State art history student, Margalo is passionate about transforming spaces and celebrating the people and wildlife around us, particularly themes of environmental conservation. Working primarily in spray paint, Margalo began painting murals during high school in response to an ad in the newspaper and has been in love with the process ever since. Find more mural work at @margalomurals on Instagram/Facebook or margalomurals.com.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts operates daily on the following schedule:
Wednesday, July 8, 2026 – 10:00am through 2:00pm
Thursday, July 9, 2026 – 10:00am through 7:00pm
Friday, July 10, 2026 – 10:00am through 7:00pm
Saturday, July 11, 2026 – 10:00am through 7:00pm
Sunday, July 12, 2026 – 11:00am through 4:00pm (Murals must be completed by 12:00pm)
Support for this exhibition is provided in part by The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts in collaboration with the Downtown State College America250 Committee. Mural Sponsors include The Penn Stater Hotel & Conference Center, Hyatt Place State College, and AccuWeather.