Arts festivals across the country often advertise themselves with collectible posters. Some festivals hire an advertising agency to design their poster. Others commission the prior year’s Best of Show winner to do an illustration for their poster. The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts does things a bit differently.
Our posters are unusual in that they’re the work of one family. For 50 years Lanny Sommese, distinguished professor emeritus of visual arts in Penn State’s Stuckeman School of Visual Arts, designed the Festival’s poster. Sommese retired from Penn State in the spring of 2014, and in 2017 his daughter Saige joined him as our poster’s co-designer. Lanny Sommese passed away in 2022, but his daughter continues this unique legacy.
The poster for the 2024 festival was designed by Saige Sommese, a 2017 graduate of the Penn State Graphic Design Program. She has been designing the Festival Posters since 2018, at first assisting her father, Lanny, with the design, and now creating them herself. In addition to poster design, Saige specializes in logos, branding, illustration and UI web design for individuals, small brands, and large companies alike.
To learn more about the festival’s poster, check out Festival Posters Tell Stories Too, a 2017 blog post by Rick Bryant. A full set of Sommese’s Arts Festival posters is on display in the HUB-Robeson Center on Penn State’s University Park campus.