Panels For Porterville
Mclane High School gifts PACC with 31 hand painted panels
The Porterville Area Coordinating Council (PACC) graciously received a huge gift from Artventure Academy from Mclane High School out of Fresno on Friday morning.
Marc Patterson, a former art teacher at Mclane High School and head of the Artventure Academy, drove to PACC to drop off 31 panels that had been hand painted by various student artists. The panels, when displayed together, create a large historical mural that depicts the effects the drought had on residents living oin East Porterville.
Patterson said he has students work on one big project every year, and in 2016 he chose Porterville because the drought was having a severe impact on local residents. He said he first heard about the drought’s effects on Porterville from an interview done by Buzzfeed and decided to load a charter bus full of student artists and have them transported to the east side of the city. The students made multiple trips into Porterville to take photos, talk to residents, and to meet with local water experts who could give them a fully rounded idea of how the drought was impacting the city.
“We spent a year and brought kids down in a charter bus,” said Patterson. “We gave them cameras and they started interviewing people in east Porterville. We made about 15 trips to talk to people in their homes. We also brought a group of water experts from the city to give us some information about what was really going on too.”
Once the students had collected enough information, they set out to begin creating the mural. By stretching canvas over closet doors, Patterson and his Artventure Academy students had large panels to cover. The idea was to give a sequence to the viewer, from entering into the City of Porterville to entering the homes and hearing the stories of the residents on the east side of the city. The students did such a remarkable job their work has been dis
played up and down the state, and has been presented in multiple places throughout the country. Patterson said it’s his vision to create pieces for social justice and all of the big projects he assigns his students have a strong theme.
“This is a donation,” said Patterson. “I think it’s good to bring them back. I went in and looked at all the panels and touched them up and some conservation work. They are museum quality and they are sealed.
“The panels are set up as a sequence so the first group of panels is as you’re driving in (to Porterville). You see the landscape, and then you’re entering Porterville, and then there’s a couple panels on entering east Porterville so you can see a transition. Then once we get into east Porterville we go into the homes and do the interviews. That’s the very intimate part of it. We also did a video that won a student Emmy award because it was so good.”
Elva Beltran, a long time volunteer with PACC, said she wasn’t quite sure where the panels were going to be displayed just yet, but talked about possibly displaying a few of them in the future library facility. She also suggested displaying some at the schools and maybe in the museum. Fred Beltran stated he was hoping to find somewhere with enough wall space to display the 31-panel mural as a whole. It’s still undecided where the mural will go or if it will have to be broken up into smaller sections for display.
To view more projects created by Artventure Academy students, visit Artventureacademy.com
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