Community. Sustainability. Support. Empowerment. Discovery. Celebration. Safety. Creative Space-Making.

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Logo by Ryan Spahr, 2021

A new nonprofit arts organization based in Harrisburg, 717 Arts takes inspiration from our local and regional community to keep building for the future.

The Mission:

717 Arts serves to create and grow accessible space and support through sustainable practices for artists, companies, and communities on the margins and fringes, celebrating uniqueness with locally-inspired spirit and joy.

Our flagship programming:

The Harrisburg Fringe Festival, inaugural festival July 6-9, 2023. The HFF is a large-scale community project involving many local artists, venues, organizations, and businesses working in partnership. 717 Arts is proud to be spearheading this initiative, delighted to be estanlishing so many community partnerships through the work, and glad to be bringing accessibility and empowerment to artists with the Fringe experience.

One popular communications tool for 717 Arts is our Instagram account [@717artscommunity], where we aggregate story posts from other artists within the 717 Arts community, covering area that includes Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, and more. By helping boost signal on what everyone else is doing, we hope to bring our arts community even closer together in a spirit of togetherness and collaboration, making digital space for all we can. Additionally, the collection of stories is a helpful newsfeed for local arts patrons and supporters, too, to find out what’s going on in the greater 717 Arts community in south central PA. We mostly use our posts on Instagram to highlight work we’re directly engaged in: organizational progress, programming highlights, volunteer projects, and more.