Susquehanna Art Museum

The Susquehanna Art Museum (SAM) is a non-profit art museum located in the Midtown neighborhood of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the state's capital. Founded in 1989 by a group of central Pennsylvania art educators, it is the only dedicated art museum in Central Pennsylvania. SAM operates as a non-collecting institution, meaning its galleries display a rotating schedule of borrowed and traveling exhibitions rather than a permanent collection. It is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museum Association. After more than two decades of nomadic operation across a series of temporary spaces, SAM opened its permanent home in January 2015 at 1401 North Third Street, occupying an adaptively reused 1916 bank building. History Founding and early years The museum's origins trace to the 1970s, when a group of local artists and art educators began meeting in Harrisburg to discuss the absence of a dedicated art museum in the state capital. Pennsylvania was among a small number of states without a dedicated art museum in its capital city. Early gatherings were hosted by Clyde McGeary, then senior arts adviser for the Pennsylvania Department of Education , who later recalled the group as "basically a bunch of art teachers from local districts, along with other community people" who "knew. Early locations For the first two and a half decades of its existence, SAM operated out of a series of temporary and borrowed spaces, including donated space provided by the State Museum of Pennsylvania . The museum also resided at Strawberry Square , a downtown Harrisburg shopping and office complex, before moving in 2000 to the Kunkel Building , also known as the Feller Building, at 301 Market Street in Harrisburg's central business district , where the museum occupied between 5,000 and 6,000 square feet of exhibition space. Both Strawberry Square and the Kunkel Building.