On Jan. 16, 2015, the Susquehanna Art Museum expects to open the doors of its new museum with an appropriately named exhibit. It’s “Pop Open,” Niagara University’s sparkling collection featuring such pop art icons as Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, and—of course—Warhol.
“We’ve got a soup can,” assures SAM Executive Director Laurene Buckley.
In other words, the train that is SAM is now moving ahead at full-speed.
More than three years have passed since SAM announced it had selected a site in Midtown Harrisburg as its permanent home. However, fundraising challenges and design changes delayed construction beyond some demolition, which began last summer. In the meantime, SAM has used space in the State Museum to mount exhibits.
The bid now has been awarded for renovating and adding on to the former Keystone/Fulton bank branch at N. 3rd and Calder streets to create a permanent home for the capital city’s art museum. The partnership of JEM Group-Carrolton Design broke ground in mid-March. SAM will get the building on Dec. 22, and exhibits secured for some vague future point now have official opening dates.
A $7 million project seen as a major piece in the Midtown revival puzzle is taking shape. Now, say museum officials, the capital city’s dedicated art museum will rejoin the community and rededicate itself to showcasing art as a tool for entertainment, economic activity and, most importantly, education.
Buckley admits that calling SAM a “Kunstehalle”—the European term for an art exhibition museum lacking a permanent collection—might sound pretentious, so she settles on “potpourri.”
“And that’s just fine with me,” she says. “Art is broadly defined, and we intend it to be broadly defined.”
With 3,500 square feet of space in its exhibition hall, the new SAM can mix and match exhibits. Maybe a show on art furniture will augment an exhibit on past and present architecture planned in conjunction with Historic Harrisburg Association, the Art Association of Harrisburg and the American Institute of Architects.
Harrisburg needs destinations, says SAM Board Chair Jack Scott, and the new space, from Philadelphia architectural firm EwingCole, is designed to attract. In the high-ceilinged, renovated bank space that greets visitors, works from SAM’s DOSHI Gallery will line the wall. The bank vault will be a family orientation area, “maybe with storytime on Sundays,” says Buckley.
A high-tech education room will allow streaming of lessons and talks. Perhaps the café will set up tables outdoors on nice days. Students from the Channels Food Rescue Kitchen School might operate a mobile snack cart. A garden, the size of two Midtown lots, will offer please-touch sculptures and maybe a sensory garden with herbs and braille plaques.
Scott is a retired technologist who claims not to have “an art bone in my body.” But while his artist wife, Carol Scott, was vice president of the Garden State Watercolor Society in New Jersey, he helped build membership from 50 to 250 by capturing names of artists, donors, buyers and browsers in a 3,000-person database.
“The object lesson there is, you must market art,” says Scott. “It isn’t that you have to sell art, but you have to market. People have to be aware that it’s there. They need to understand its value, and they need the opportunity to make a choice to experience art.”
Art is essential to “creative expression and developing creative thinking,” says Scott. It also returns $5 to $8 in commercial value.
“It comes back in commerce. It comes back in child creativity. It comes back in freedom of expression,” he says. “Why would we not do this?”
The new building is revitalizing SAM’s mission to educate. The VanGO! bus that takes artwork to schoolchildren and events is no longer a bus but a retrofitted RV (staffers are excited—much easier to drive and cheaper to operate). “Art to Go” portfolios for teachers, with lesson plans on topics ranging from Pennsylvania artists to Georgia O’Keeffe, are newly customized and digitized.
SAM’s second exhibit will feature the works of renowned children’s book artist Faith Ringgold, with local, award-winning artist Jonathan Bean—a Publisher’s Weekly “Artist to Watch”—setting up his studio in the exhibit area.
“We’re really trying to build partnerships with as many audiences as we can, as well as bring museum education into the 21st century with lots of interactives,” says Director of Education and E-learning Andrea Glass.
Name a Midtown business or nonprofit, and SAM is probably partnering with it. Movies and Midtown Cinema. Food and Yellow Bird Café and Sayford Market. Parking and HACC.
Scott is intent on “narrowing the width of the river” that divides east and west shores, and the addition of Dave Reager, the Camp Hill attorney and a founder of Plein Air Camp Hill, to the board should help. Putting the new museum in Midtown was a risk, says Scott, but it’s the “right choice” for a Harrisburg arts corridor.
SAM expects to hire from the community and keep its doors open to the community, says Buckley. Though admission will probably be charged, at least initially, museum officials are brainstorming ways to schedule free-admission days, she says. Regular events will range from “fancy preview sit-down dinners, all the way to block parties—which we’ve already instituted—with local bands.”
The museum can also serve as a catalyst for further development in Midtown and greatly enhance its growing reputation as an arts district, says Glass.
“Being part of the community is being a cultural hub and having the community invest value in what we are doing,” she says. “It’s really about building ties with the community at all levels.”
Follow SAM’s progress, see events and learn about discussing partnerships (naming opportunities in the new building are still available) by visiting sqart.org or SAM’s Facebook page.
