First Night State College is a family-oriented community event that celebrates the beginning of a new year. The event was founded in 1994 and patterned after First Night festivals across the United States that are intended to promote the performing and visual arts as a means to unify citizens on New Year’s Eve.
Robert Norman Fisher was an internationally known sculptor and designer who was a pioneer in the use of computer visualization in sculpture. He was a longtime resident of Bellefonte and was a leader in the historic preservation of the borough. His work can be seen in several Centre County buildings.
The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, popularly known as “Arts Fest,” is a five-day event that draws more than 125,000 visitors to Centre County every summer. Since its founding in 1967, the festival has become one of the top arts festivals in the United States. The festival resumes in 2022 after not being held the past two years.
The Bellefonte Art Museum for Centre County showcases the work of artists from Centre County and around the world. It also hosts regular art classes.The museum is in the Linn House, which was built in 1810 by Philip Benner and is in the Bellefonte National Register of Historic Places District.
Public motion picture screenings in Centre County paralleled the growth of the movies as a popular form of public entertainment in rural and small-town America in the first half of the 20th century, and their transformation to part of a wider range of entertainment in the late 20th and early 21st century.
The Palmer Museum of Art is Penn State’s art museum. It is the largest art museum between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. A new $85 million, 73,000-square-foot museum opened in June 2024 within the Penn State Arboretum. It nearly doubles the museum’s size and includes twenty galleries, as well as new education and event spaces, a museum store and café, and a sculpture path.
The Penn State Blue Band is the university’s marching band that performs at football games and other major events. The band, which is comprised of more than 300 members, is open to all students at the University Park campus.
The David House is a historic dwelling in Snow Shoe that is now the home of a museum to preserve the history of the Mountaintop Area. The white-clapboard house was built on North Front Street in the late 1880s by the Lehigh Valley Coal Co. to provide housing for workers.
The Land-Grant Frescoes in the foyer of Old Main are a Penn State landmark that commemorate the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant College Act and the promise of higher education. Commissioned as a class gift from the Penn State Class of 1932, the fresco on the northern wall of Old Main pays tribute to the university’s land-grant […]
Grilled Stickies are pastries that for many years were a staple of Penn State students and particularly patrons of the former Ye Olde College Diner, a favorite student hangout on College Avenue for decades. Although the diner closed in 2018, stickies continue to be made and sold.