A 1916 bank in Midtown Harrisburg now houses the Susquehanna Art Museum, the only dedicated art museum in Central Pennsylvania. Founded in 1989 by a group of central Pennsylvania art educators, it remains the only dedicated art museum in Central Pennsylvania. SAM operates as a non-collecting institution, so the galleries show a rotating schedule of borrowed and traveling exhibitions rather than a permanent collection, and 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 expanded and renovated by the Philadelphia architectural firm EwingCole. The 20,000-square-foot facility preserves neoclassical interiors, including 27-foot gold leaf ceilings, and a converted bank vault that serves as an intimate exhibition gallery. Today the museum mounts more than a dozen exhibitions per year drawn from museums, private collections, commercial galleries, and individual artists from local, regional, national, and international sources.
Notice the gilded 27-foot ceilings overhead and the converted bank vault that now serves as an intimate exhibition gallery.