Community Calendar

Have a poem or an idea for a poem on the theme of SANCTUARY?
We’d love to see it!

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church is sponsoring its fourth annual poetry competition and culminating reading and celebration.
Submit now through August 29, 2025, to have your poems considered for cash prizes and inclusion in a print anthology anthology on the theme of SANCTUARY.

See more details here:
http://artsat.standrewsc.org/

Got game? The Warren County Historical Society’s Trail of History Challenge V is set to begin on May 12, 2025. Part scavenger hunt and part treasure hunt, this competition requires players to collect answers from around the county.

To get your game on, start with a visit to the Warren County Historical Society at 210 Fourth Ave., Warren, PA, any time this summer. The $10 registration fee provides you a clue packet and instructions for loads of fun! Each clue requires you to travel to a different part of Warren County to discover the answer.

Play as an individual or part of team, and spend your summer learning more about beautiful Warren County. But hurry! By September, it will be game over. Completed answer sheets returned by Friday, September 5, 2025, at 4:00 PM will be entered into a drawing for the prize pack. A special thank you to this year’s Challenge sponsors: the Warren County Visitors Bureau, Yankee Bush Productions, and Whirley Drinkworks!

The Warren County Historical Society is open Monday-Friday, from 8:30 AM – 4:30 PM. For more information, please call (814) 723-1795, visit www.warrenhistory.org or like the Society’s Facebook page.

It’s July 4th! Come take a hike around the lake on a combination of trails with the naturalist. Wear your hiking gear and bring water since this is a 2.5 hour hike!
Wentz Education Center

What better way is there to spend your Fourth of July than celebrating local history at Fort Roberdeau! In honor of Independence Day, Fort Roberdeau is open free of charge on the 4th of July! Don’t miss living history demonstrations at Fort Roberdeau from 10 until 3:30! Experience 18th century militia men, rangers, farmers, tinsmiths, and frontier families all in period clothing! Explore the fort’s nature trails, bring a packed lunch and enjoy at our picnic spots, look to the stars at the observatory! Find treasures at the fort gift shop! Wear your red, white, and blue to the Star Spangled Fourth at Fort Roberdeau…the only remaining frontier Revolutionary War fort in Pennsylvania! Just 9 miles north of Altoona, off Kettle Road in Sinking Valley. Learn more at FortRoberdeau.org.

Explore the changing flavors of the growing season with a taste of fresh produce direct from the beds in the children’s garden!

For more than 1,000 years, Japan has produced some of the world’s finest paper, using strong natural fibers and exceptional production techniques passed down through the generations. Japanese handmade paper, known as washi (和紙), is still made in some areas of Japan and used in painting, calligraphy, origami, and other traditional art forms.

Recently, contemporary Japanese artists have been turning to this supple yet sturdy material, using it as a medium for creating highly textured two-dimensional works, complex sculptures, and dramatic installations. Employing techniques ranging from layering, weaving, and dying to twisting, folding, and cutting, these artists demonstrate the endless contemporary applications of this ancient material.

Washi Transformed focuses on washi as a medium for contemporary art in Japan and spotlights the works of nine very different contemporary Japanese artists who are exploring the artistic potential of this traditional material. The artists—Hina Aoyama, Eriko Horiki, Kyoko Ibe, Yoshio Ikezaki, Kakuko Ishii, Yuko Kimura, Yuko Nishimura, Takaaki Tanaka, Ayomi Yoshida*—all push the boundaries of Japanese washi art in terms of texture, dimension, and scale, creating works that challenge our assumptions about the nature of the material. Their abstract paper sculptures, lyrical folding screens, dramatic installations, and highly textured wall pieces all demonstrate the resilience and versatility of washi as a medium in the realm of international contemporary art.

Washi Transformed: New Expressions in Japanese Paper was organized by Meher McArthur and is toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC. Its presentation at the Palmer was overseen by Patrick McGrady, Charles V. Hallman Senior Curator.

Support for this exhibition is provided in part by Palmer Museum of Art Sandstone Members.

*Work by this artist is not able to be included in the installation at this venue. Digital information about her monumental sculpture will be available in the exhibition.

Looking at art can feel a lot like reading a good book. Words on a page conjure vivid images in our minds, while works of art reveal compelling stories and narratives upon close observation. This exhibition brings together a selection of objects in various media to promote visual literacy and explore connections between text and image.

Four thematic panels in the gallery propose different strategies for analyzing the ways text and image combine to produce meaning. Some objects convey a narrative in pictures or illustrate a poem. Others integrate text as a graphic element within an image to emphasize an idea or influence an audience.

By engaging with visual rhetoric to analyze form, the exhibition will support first-year students in understanding how visual elements communicate ideas in art. Ultimately, students can apply the transferable skills in observation and analysis that are learned in the museum to their own fields of study, as well as their interactions with visual and textual media in our everyday world.

Novel Objects: Connecting Art and Language was curated by Brandi Breslin, Director of Education, and Keri Mongelluzzo, Educator for Academic Engagement and Access, with research and interpretation contributions by Marie Huard, graduate assistant and doctoral candidate in art education.

Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art.

Life is short. Break the rules. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that made you smile. —Robert Doisneau

 The majority of works in the Palmer’s permanent collection have come to the museum as gifts. Often those works enter the collection during the patron’s lifetime, while other donors choose to gift their works as a bequest. This exhibition features a selection of photographs from the collection of Penn State alumna Nancy Arnold (Education, ’71), who has graciously identified the Palmer as the future home for her much-loved, carefully curated works.

The notion of “parallel play” is borrowed from the early stages of childhood development—when children independently play alongside one another. The title also emphasizes the amusing comedy of chance encounters and unpredictable occurrences that have come to characterize the work of street photographers, photojournalists, fashion photographers, and contemporary artists during the modern era. The photographs included in Parallel Play invite us to see the commonplace in new ways and to venture into pictorial worlds characterized by visual wit and uncanny humor.

We hope you’ll play along.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Julie Blackmon, Robert Doisneau, Elliott Erwitt, Cig Harvey, Thurston Hopkins, O. Winston Link, Hellen van Meene, Ruth Orkin, Norman Parkinson, Priscilla Rattazzi, Marc Riboud, Roman Signer, Rodney Smith, Vee Speers, George Tice, and William Wegman.

Parallel Play: Photographs from the Nancy Arnold Collection was curated by Interim Director Joyce Robinson and organized by the Palmer Museum of Art with support from the Friends of the Palmer Museum of Art Endowment.

WHAT'S IN A WORD?
The Art of Interpretation

Interpretation - To explain the meaning of something.

Art interpretation can be subjective. Personal perspectives, beliefs, and experiences may cause different people to interpret the same thing differently.

During May and June, BAM registry artists will explore this concept by creating art that responds to selected verbal prompts. This will both showcase how different artists interpret the same word and offer a glimpse into their interpretation process.

The BAM community nominated these interpretive prompts:
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