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 it a bit differently.
For more than fifty years, the Arts Festival poster has been designed or influenced by Lanny Sommese. After his passing in 2022, his daughter Saige Sommese, took on the difficult task of continuing this great Festival tradition. From 2023 to 2025, Saige “collaborated” with her father by way of using some of his concepts and bringing them to completion.
In 2026, we made the decision to move forward asking Saige to create a Festival poster from conception to completion that was all her own, and we are thrilled with the results! Saige’s unique design celebrates the past and pushes us forward with enhanced fervor. A new era of the Festival of the Arts is upon us, and we cannot wait to discover what the next 60 years will bring!
To learn more about the Arts Festival’s posters, check out Festival Posters Tell Stories Too, a 2017 blog post 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 2026 Arts Festival poster designed by her daughter Saige.