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 are all the work of one family. For fifty 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.
To learn more about the Arts Festival’s posters, check out Festival Posters Tell Stories Too, a 2017 blog poster by then Executive Director Rick Bryant. A full set of Arts Festival posters is on display in the HUB-Robeson Center on Penn State’s University Park campus.
Kristin Sommese is proud to sponsor the 2025 Arts Festival poster designed by her daughter Saige.