Event at the Art Association of Harrisburg. Photo courtesy of the Art Association of Harrisburg
Carrie Wissler-Thomas cannot say exactly how the tourist family from Ohio found their way to the Art Association of Harrisburg.
They had visited Hersheypark and the usual suspects around town, but wanted to see a gallery, and the Harrisburg Arts District now has an app for that.
“They looked at what was going on in the region, and when they saw us, they came,” Wissler-Thomas said. “Maybe it was Google. I like to think it was the Harrisburg Arts District.”
Opinions differ as to whether Harrisburg needs an art czar, but the new app from Visit Hershey & Harrisburg takes on some of that coordination. The app puts the Harrisburg Arts District in people’s hands, whether those hands belong to visitors or locals looking to discover a new scene.
With galleries, performing arts groups, murals, shopping, and food and drink all within walking distance, the Harrisburg Arts District is a natural fit for an app that lets visitors customize their experience.
Critical mass
The Harrisburg Arts District spans the city’s downtown, midtown and riverfront areas. Created by Visit Hershey & Harrisburg, the district now has an app for the digital age. The new app allows visitors to browse by categories such as murals, venues, events, museums, galleries, monuments, shopping and food and drink.
App users can customize their itineraries, creating and planning walks that offer the experiences, sights, sounds and tastes they desire. They can listen to short audio commentaries describing each of the Sprocket Mural Works pieces they are taking time to enjoy. They might hear how Ryan Spahr drew inspiration from the surrounding city for the colorful butterfly of “Arise,” or how Ecuadorian artist Vera Primavera’s dramatic “Bruja” celebrates female empowerment.
Development of the app was funded by a Creative Communities Grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Dauphin County tourism grants support advertising campaigns to promote the arts district.
The creative sector contributes $30 billion to Pennsylvania’s economy, according to PCA Executive Director Karl Blischke. A defined arts district gives this sector a place, he said, and “place is the driver for decisions about where we want to live and where we want to travel.”
The app is giving new impetus to a growing arts scene that is contributing to Dauphin County’s economic development, tourism and a record number of hotel rooms booked, County Commissioner George Hartwick said at the app’s launch in July.
“Sometimes we don’t even know what’s in our backyard,” he said. “This is an opportunity for us to reacquaint ourselves with all the great assets we have and give visitors from all over the country that opportunity.”
Alice Anne Schwab, executive director of the Susquehanna Art Museum, attributed the transformation in the look of Midtown Harrisburg, which includes the opening of a new cocktail lounge on the site of a former pub, to the “critical mass” of activity in the Harrisburg Arts District.
“There’s more and more happening in this area because people want to be connected to the arts,” she said. “Yes, it brings money, but it brings something more important – all the people coming to us, to the Whitaker Center, to all the performing arts organizations.”
Mural by Sprocket Mural Works
More beautiful things
Harrisburg’s arts sector is made up of organizations and artists dynamic enough to thrive on their own without a city arts director or umbrella organization adding extra bureaucracy, said Carrie Wissler-Thomas, executive director of the Art Association of Harrisburg. But the Harrisburg Arts District needs VHH’s cross-promotional marketing, amplified by the app, to attract visitors, audiences and participants, she said.
“It’s difficult to reach an audience outside of our own constituency,” Wissler-Thomas said. “We all have so many people who like the finer things in life – the theaters, the galleries, the art, the fine food and the breweries – and that broadens our audience.”
Harrisburg-based artist Reina “R76” Wooden watched with dismay as the pandemic wiped out the area’s small galleries. With exhibition spaces becoming increasingly scarce, she found a new home in a studio at the Millworks, an app store in Midtown Harrisburg.
Wooden told TheBurg that she has “demanded all four years in the mayoral race” that the city of Harrisburg needs an arts and culture department. The creation of the Harrisburg Arts District helped fill that gap, she believes.
“Obviously something happened behind the scenes,” she said.
The app is “a great start” and a powerful megaphone for artists and performers to get their work and presence out there, she added. In the future, she hopes to be more inclusive, adding smaller galleries, music and spoken word, and expanding the presence to other parts of the city, including Olde Uptown and Allison Hill.
“When you say ‘Harrisburg,’ it has to be beyond Midtown,” she said. “There are staples of the art world that we know as a creative community, but you want people traveling from out of town because they want to find these quirky, small, unique places that aren’t just about, ‘Please buy my food, please buy my beer.'”
Visit the Hershey Harrisburg App
The beginning
The idea for the app came from Brad Jones, president and CEO of Harristown Development Corp., who contacted VHH about the development. The app is limited to downtown, midtown and the riverfront because research by VHH’s director of experiential development found that the key to successful arts districts across the country is walkability.
“We asked what that footprint looks like when someone comes and wants to park their car and not move it,” said Allison Rohrbaugh, VHH’s communications director. “It’s not all the arts-related businesses in the city of Harrisburg. It’s that walkable footprint that says you can come here and spend a whole day or a whole weekend visiting something that’s really accessible and really close.”
The sites and venues listed would also need to have a local presence and reliable opening hours and established websites so that visitors who are unfamiliar with the city “can easily find out where an arts organization is, when it is open and what it can offer,” she said.
Some of the organizations listed are VHH partners, but VHH membership is not a requirement, Rohrbaugh said. The list of locations “will still change and expand a little bit.”
Jason Graves, the city’s economic development director, called the app “just the beginning of what could happen” to bring more people into the community.
The app with its direct links to the websites of the listed organizations is “very cool,” said Wissler-Thomas.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “It’s a miracle. It’s getting the message out to all of us. All cultural groups do such wonderful things. There’s no denying that it’s difficult to get the message out to people outside of our membership. Now it’s reaching even more people.”
For more information, see www.visithersheyharrisburg.org or simply download the app.
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