July 14-17
State College, Pennsylvania
Downtown State College & Penn State Campus
305 Artists
Deadline: January 22
Application Fee: $35
Booth Fees: $550 10'x10'; $1,200 10'x20'
Why should you apply to this festival? Here is what its director, Rick Bryant, says:
Our festival, known to artists as 'the Penn State Show', and the Penn Staters as the 'Arts Fest', is new in its 50th year on the University Park campus of Penn State and the streets of downtown State College, PA.
We were founded by the State College Chamber of Commerce and Penn State's College of Arts and Architecture and we're still very much a 'town/grown' event--it's a big festival in a small town.
We bring roughly 125,000 people to State College over five days of our event in July. That's not a number we make up, we do an audience survey each year administered by a facility member at Lock Haven University.
Going to the Arts Festival is a rite of passage for Penn Staters. Students don't miss it and Alumni return for "Arts Festival Alumni Weekend," a program of the Penn State Alumni Association, the largest dues paying alumni association in the world over 170,000 members strong. Arts Festival Alumni Weekend is a time to renew old college ties, attend special programs, and of course, shop at the "Arts Fest".
Alumni proudly wearing blue pins sporting their year of graduation are often an artist's best customer. Some alums even opt to stay in dorms! (Artists can do that too!)
Some other things to consider:
- We're consistently ranked in the Top Ten in the Sunshine Artist magazine rankings (#1 last time around!)
- We hand out over $17,500 in prizes. The top prize is $2,700; our second prize is $1,500. We hand out over 20 prize, and 50 people will be invited back as jury-exempt artists in 2016 based on on-site jury scores.
- We provide lots of amenities including one of the best artists' receptions on the circuit
- In the 2015 survey by ArtFairCalendar.com art fair patrons chose us as one of the nation's Best Art Fairs that they love to attend.
The event also includes a full day of activities for children, performances by international, national, and regional acts on three outdoor states and at four indoor venues, a book festival, and a celebration of Italian Street Painting. And, if you're up for it, there's a 5k/10k/10 mile run bright and early Sunday morning with over 500 entrants.
