Festivals, markets, performances, open studios, and community events can create temporary moments of activity. I am most interested in what they can do beyond the event itself. They can introduce people to artists and businesses, make public spaces feel more usable, create paid opportunities, build new habits, and help people experience a place differently.
At LEDC, I approached events as part of a larger civic and economic system. The goal was to attract a crowd and also strengthen relationships among artists, businesses, residents, visitors, and the places they shared. A successful event changes how people experience a place.
Creating reasons to gather
Arts on the Avenue: A cultural festival built around a downtown
Arts on the Avenue brought together artists, musicians, businesses, community organizations, and regional audiences in the heart of Lansdowne’s commercial district.
Leading up to the event, I worked with community organizations to create participatory yarn bombings throughout the festival site, giving residents a role in transforming the streetscape before the event began. During the festival, Lansdowne Avenue became a place to walk, browse, stop, and linger, with artist booths woven into the existing downtown rather than isolated from it.
Candid view from yarn bombing event
More than 70 juried artists sold work directly to the public, retaining 100 percent of their sales. Live music was presented on the WXPN Welcomes stage, curated by Open Sound, while the YMCA Kid Zone created a dedicated area for family activities. Together, art, music, food, businesses, and community programming created multiple reasons to move through the district and stay.
The economic value came from that density of experience. Artists gained access to audiences and sales. Existing businesses encountered visitors who might not otherwise have entered the commercial district. Families could move between the festival and the surrounding downtown, experiencing Lansdowne not as the backdrop for an event but as part of the event itself. Some brick-and-mortar businesses reported record-breaking sales during the festival.
To support the festival, I expanded sponsorship and built stronger cultural partnerships around the event, helping increase its reach while bringing additional resources into a free public program.
2026 Highlights
- 2,000+ visitors
- 70+ juried artists
- 8 Food Trucks
- 6 hours of free public programming
- 5 programming partners
- $9,000+ in sponsorship secured
Candid view from Arts on the Ave 2026
A Bit of the Arts: A seasonal marketplace with a community life of its own
A Bit of the Arts combined an artist marketplace with music, student work, and the social rhythms on the Black Friday and Small Business Saturday holiday weekend.
Candid view at A Bit of the Arts 2025. Photo by Daniel Jackson for Embassy: Interactive
The event created a direct sales opportunity for artists while giving visitors a reason to spend time locally during one of the year’s most competitive retail periods. Rather than separating art sales from cultural experience, the marketplace surrounded purchasing with music, exhibitions, conversation, and opportunities to meet the people who made the work.
In 2025, A Bit of the Arts featured 38 artists, more than 200 student works, and 11 musicians. Attendance reached 633 visitors, a 36 percent increase over the previous year. Buying art was part of the experience, but so was meeting artists, hearing music, seeing young people’s work, and connecting with neighbors. The result was a marketplace that functioned as both a direct economic opportunity for artists and a recurring community gathering.
Open Open Open: Connecting existing assets into one shared experience
Open Open Open grew from recognizing how much cultural activity was already happening across Lansdowne, often within a few blocks of one another, but promoted and experienced separately.
The full event, Open Town, Open Studio, Open Sound, connected live performances by Open Sound, open artist studios at Utility Works, gallery exhibitions, sidewalk activity, and special late-night offerings from downtown businesses into one walkable evening. Visitors could move among shops, studios, art, and music, encountering different parts of Lansdowne’s cultural life within a single experience.
The strategy was deliberately lightweight. Instead of inventing another major festival, I coordinated existing programs, schedules, communications, and audiences, connecting them through shared marketing. Businesses were encouraged to stay open later. Artists gained visitors in their studios. Music audiences encountered galleries and shops. Each part became more visible through its relationship to the others.
Lansdowne’s compact, walkable downtown made that possible. The project leveraged proximity as an asset, creating a cultural circuit around an existing activity. Sometimes the strongest cultural strategy is not to create something new, but to make the connections among existing assets more visible.
2025 Highlights
- 10 open artist studios
- 15 pop-up vendors
- 1,000+ visitors
- 5 music performances across 3 locations
- 15 open businesses
- 3 blocks of walkable cultural activity
- 4 gallery exhibitions
Candid views
Art in the Garden: Building Public Engagement Across a Season
Art in the Garden was a season-long partnership between InLiquid and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society at PHS Meadowbrook Farm. The project combined an outdoor sculpture exhibition, rotating artist residencies, and artist-led public classes from May through October.
Site engagement by Teresa Shields
The partnership brought contemporary art into a place where people were already gathering for gardens, horticulture, and recreation. Visitors did not need to identify as part of an arts audience or make a separate trip to a gallery. They encountered sculpture, working artists, and public programs as part of their experience of the property.
A group exhibition remained installed throughout Meadowbrook’s gardens, structures, and grounds for the duration of the season. As plants grew, weather changed, and visitors returned, the relationship between the artwork and the landscape continued to shift. The exhibition became part of the evolving life of the site rather than a temporary intervention experienced only once.
Rotating artist residencies introduced new activity from month to month. Artists used Meadowbrook as a place for observation, experimentation, and creative development, while visitors could encounter artistic practice through conversation, visible work in progress, and public classes.
The project demonstrated how cultural programming can expand the audience for contemporary art by placing it within an established public destination. It also gave visitors new ways to notice and interpret a familiar environment.
Farmers Market as Civic Infrastructure
The Lansdowne Farmers Market became one of the clearest examples of how a recurring public event can serve many parts of community life at once. At its most basic, the market connected residents with farmers, food producers, and small businesses. But its regular rhythm also made it a platform for creative work, public health, community organizations, food access, and social connection.
Unlike a festival that transforms a place for a single day, the market created a weekly habit. People return. Vendors build relationships with customers. Residents encountered organizations and programs they might not otherwise seek out. Artists, musicians, and writers became part of the public experience of the market.
From 2024 to 2025, annual attendance increased by approximately 73%, from 2,700 to 4,613 visitors over the full season. The average number of vendors grew 36% from 14 to 19. The strength of the market lay not in any single program but in the accumulation of repeated encounters over time.
Growing a local marketplace
The market supported vendors not only by providing selling space, but by helping them build a regular audience. For some businesses, the market was a place to test products, learn what customers responded to, and build repeat relationships. For others, it provided visibility that could lead to additional events, referrals, wholesale opportunities, or connections with other LEDC programs.
I treated vendor growth and audience growth as connected. A stronger vendor mix gave people more reasons to return, while more consistent attendance made the market more useful to businesses. The result was a market that grew in both participation and economic activity without losing its role as a familiar neighborhood gathering place.
Candid view from the market
Expanding who can participate
Food access became an increasingly important part of the market’s development. A SNAP pilot began in 2025, with the goal of moving toward fuller participation and making the market more usable for more residents. That work required developing a sales system that would allow us to receive payments on behalf of vendors, and how communication, as well as increase visibility and vendor participation, and ensure that the public understood how and where benefits could be used.
I saw food access as part of the same civic question that shaped the rest of the market: Who is this public space for, and what would make it genuinely usable to more people?
Candid view from the market
Making creative work visible in everyday public life
Artist of the week
The market also created recurring opportunities for creative workers through its
Artist of the Week, Musician of the Week, and a paid Writer of the Week programs that brought artistic practices into a space where people were already gathering. Creative work could be encountered as part of a Saturday morning.
These programs gave artists access to audiences while also changing the character of the market. Music encouraged people to stay. Artists added another reason to browse. Writers introduced storytelling and language into a space usually organized around food and commerce.
The programs reflected a larger principle in my work: artists should not only be invited to make public spaces more appealing. Wherever possible, that visibility should also create compensation, connection, and future opportunity.
A platform for community life
Community Days and health and wellness programming enabled the market to serve as a hub for connecting residents with organizations working across the community. Partners could meet people in an informal setting rather than asking them to attend a separate meeting or program. Wellness activities, demonstrations, youth programs, and community information became part of a place people were already choosing to visit.
Candid view from a community day week
This shifted the market from a weekly transaction into a form of civic infrastructure. People came to shop, but they also encountered neighbors, organizations, artists, music, information, and activities. The market created a predictable place where different parts of community life could overlap.
The market worked because people did not have to arrive with a single purpose. They could shop, listen, learn, meet someone, discover something, and stay longer than they planned.
What These Events Made Possible
Across festivals, markets, open studios, performances, and seasonal gatherings, my work has focused on creating more connections between cultural experience and the everyday life of a place. The events varied in scale and format, but the underlying approach remained consistent: use existing assets well, create real opportunities for artists and small businesses, lower barriers to participation, and give people compelling reasons to spend time together in public.
The strongest outcomes were often cumulative. A visitor discovered a business because of a festival. A market customer became a repeat customer. An artist met a new audience. A community organization reached people outside its usual network. A resident began to experience a public space as part of their routine. Public life grows through repetition. People return to places where they have had meaningful experiences before.