In the Susquehanna Art Museum’s education wing, Director of Education Rachel Abell holds an illustration of VanGo! by Armando Veve that will be featured in the exhibit.
The Susquehanna Art Museum is celebrating a decade in its permanent home on N. 3rd Street.
To mark the milestone, SAM’s director of education Rachel Abell is curating a special show that will open in December in the museum’s education gallery: “SAM Celebrates 10 Years: An Anniversary Exhibition.”
Abell is assembling a collection of photos to tell the story of how the museum made its home in Midtown’s old Keystone Trust Bank building. It was a huge move for the institution, born in 1989 as a roving “pop-up” museum that displayed art in community storefronts and other areas.
“We’ve grown so that we can bring more impactful exhibitions to the area, more household-name artists. But we’ve never lost that community connection,” said Abell, who has been with the museum since 2023.
When SAM moved to the old bank building in 2015, it added a wing onto the building. This created the Marty and Tom Phillips Family Art Center, which houses SAM’s education classroom, and the Beverlee and Bill Lehr Gallery, a climate-controlled zone for traveling art exhibits.
Abell plans to highlight some of SAM’s biggest exhibitions, which the Lehr Gallery has made possible.
“We’ve had exhibitions of Pablo Picasso. We’ve had exhibitions of Edvard Munch,” Abell said. “It’s a really big deal to have such recognizable names.”
SAM also hosted Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” in 2022. “To have that here in the capital city was so exciting,” Abell said.
An illustration of VanGo! by artist Armando Veve in 2018, done with graphite on paper.
She praised SAM for hosting a wide array of contemporary artists.
“Some are recognized in the canon of art history and others are local,” she said. “That’s what I think makes us really special.”
Before moving to the 1923 bank building, SAM occupied spaces briefly in Strawberry Square and the Kunkel Building in downtown Harrisburg. The art museum held its first exhibitions in Midtown at 1401 N. 3rd St in January 2015.
“SAM Celebrates 10 Years: An Anniversary Exhibition” runs Dec. 3 through Feb. 15. To learn more about the Susquehanna Art Museum, visit its website.
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