Featured Speakers
Amie Bantz
Amie Bantz is a Baltimore-born artist who grew up in Minnesota, Chicago, and New Hampshire before landing in her current home of Pennsylvania. Bantz received her Bachelor's in Art Education and Master's in Arts Management and works as an Art Director in EdTech. Her career in the arts began in museum education where she worked as the Associate Curator of Education at The Trout Gallery: The Art Museum at Dickinson College then transitioned into a role as a high school art and AP Art History teacher at Carlisle High School. After receiving her Master's in 2019, Bantz accepted a position with the PA Council on the Arts and served as the Director of the Creative Sector before deciding to take her art-making full-time in 2021. She roamed as a freelance artist until she accepted her current role with Curriculum Associates in 2023. As the first bi-racial person to be born in both lines of her family, most of Bantz's work explores the duality of her existence. She draws from her experiences and uses art-making to investigate identity. Imagery steeped in familiarity and nostalgia serves as the cornerstone of Bantz's work as she uses objects and scenes from her Korean-American upbringing to tell the complex, layered story of existing as a culturally mixed woman in America.
Linda Billet
Linda Billet is a glass artisan working out of her Central Pennsylvania studio. She’s known for creating detailed fused glass tiles that are incorporated into her mosaics.
Billet’s initiation to glass techniques was a semester of glass blowing at Harrisburg Area Community College. However, her craftsmanship is mainly self-taught. In 2008, she quit her job to pursue art full time. She started glass fusing with a tiny kiln that she operated in her kitchen. As her kiln space grew, she moved to her garage and eventually added a studio onto her home. She went from making jewelry to glass bowls, then fused glass panels.
In an effort to make larger work she started incorporating fused glass tiles into mosaics. In 2011, she was asked to work in a school residency to make a mosaic with the students. This led to community mosaics with many various groups. In addition to schools from K through 12, she worked with mentally ill adults, senior citizens, inmates, hospital workers and workplace event attendees. Some projects have invited an entire city to show up to make tiles for inclusion in a mosaic.
In her words, “Community projects are a way that I feel I can help all types of people learn to communicate and collaborate while having fun. Seeing what we accomplish together ultimately builds their self-belief. Community mosaics are a way to have every individual’s idea be seen and when all these ideas come together, something beautiful always happens. I cannot imagine “work” that is more fun than what I do in my profession.”
Alyssa Hagarman
Horticulture Manager at ‘Hershey Gardens’
Alyssa is our Horticulture Manager at Hershey Gardens. Alyssa has been working at the gardens since spring of 2010. Originally, she was hired to care for the Children’s Garden as well as help where ever needed. The horticulture manager position requires her to design the seasonal displays for the entire 23 acres. Along with the seasonal displays Alyssa locates and orders all the plant material that is planted on the grounds. This also requires her to keep records of how many are being planted, where they are planted and any other important plant identification and care information. Alyssa stepped into this role when the previous Horticulture Specialist retired in 2016.
Alyssa is a graduate of Pennsylvania College of Technology, where she majored in Horticulture with an emphasis in landscape technology. Some of her favorite courses were the Plant Identification classes and Landscape Design. Outside of work, Alyssa loves helping her husband care for their home and garden, spending time with family, hanging out with her 2 dogs and mostly being a mom to their little boys.
Additional Anticipated Speaker: Jimmie Maria
Performing Artists
Pamela Black
Pamela J. Black is a contemporary artist working primarily with fluid acrylics, watercolors, water-based drawing tools, and abstraction. She is drawn to abstraction as a way to transfer her noisy mind and thoughts into these other unique worlds on canvas, while finding a sense of balance between chaos and control. Her creative process involves constant experimentation and serves as a source of meditation which is rooted in abstraction.
Pam grew up in Pennsylvania with supportive parents who always encouraged and helped foster her love for the arts from a very young age. Now, she and her brother (John Speaker) are both full-time artists, and have recently been collaborating on paintings, as they merge their art together.
Pam received her BFA from Kutztown University in 2007 and holds her Masters in Education, which she obtained while teaching art for five years. She has exhibited in galleries nationally and has completed large scale murals around the Central PA area, including Strawberry Square in Harrisburg, Ever Grain Farms in Mechanicsburg, Wild Rabbit in New Cumberland, among others.
Pam spends her days working from her in-home studio in Mechanicsburg, and spending time with her husband and two children. Most weekends, you can find her in her other studio space at The Millworks in Harrisburg, which is a local and sustainable restaurant, brewery, and art gallery with 18 artist studios.
John Speaker
John Speaker is an artist who creates wonderfully vibrant acrylic paintings that explore subjects such as spirituality, nature, and human connection. John’s mission is to be continually open to the mystery of life with a brush in-hand. He sees art as something much greater than creating beautiful images; it is a path to self-mastery, wisdom, and building community.
John is a self-taught artist who discovered a passion for art in his early twenties after struggling to find his place in the working world. Originally from central Pennsylvania, he moved to Colorado to pursue his dream of becoming a full-time artist. John has live painted at concerts and festivals across the country, including Red Rocks Amphitheater and Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. He has exhibited works in galleries such as Threyda and Mirus, created an empowering community of artists at ‘John Speaker Art Studio’ in Niwot, CO, and has amassed patrons across the world.
After almost a decade in Colorado, John has recently moved back to central PA with his wife and son to be closer to family. He hopes to discover a whole new chapter of artistic expression and integration.