This Fresno high school is getting repainted. What will happen to the student murals?
As Fresno school officials go about the task of repainting Edison High School, the system faces an unexpected controversy over how it might protect student-painted murals that depict two civil rights icons and that staff say celebrate diversity.
The murals – designed by a local artist but painted by students – depict Maya Angelou, a prolific poet and author known for her autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and César Chávez, a famed farmworker labor leader with a history of activism in the Central Valley.
The school board seemingly struck a compromise during its June 21 meeting, voting to move ahead with repainting the school, while vowing not to paint over the murals. The board also promised to gather feedback from students, as well as the designer, local artist Jason Esquivel, about what to do with them. The district’s Extended Learning department will be in charge of convening this committee of students and artists.
That process has yet to begin. Still, one option that trustees have already discussed is moving the murals inside of the school, which would mean painting over the existing murals and then repainting them on an inside wall.
Some Edison staff, including teacher Lauren Lawless, are wary. They point out that last summer, the district painted over a student mural at another Fresno Unified high school. The district apologized but never disclosed why the student art was erased.
“We’re just afraid we’re going to come back in August, and everything’s going to be gone,” Lawless said.
Lawless said that the paintings of Angelou, a Black author who wrote about her formative experiences in the segregated South, and Chávez, the child of Mexican immigrants who were migrant farm workers, hold particular significance for the student body at Edison.
“It represents our two main cultures on campus,” she said, “our Latinx cultures and African American as well.”
What might seem like a mundane bureaucratic task has raised a host of concerns in the Fresno Unified and southwest Fresno communities – regarding everything from the district’s relationship to student art to historical under-investments in southwest Fresno, where the school is located.
Edison High students voted on murals
In 2021, Edison students and staff voted on their favorite mural designs submitted by Esquivel, Edison teacher Michele Mazzei told The Bee’s Education Lab. The top votes went to his designs of Chávez, Angelou, and an image of hands of different complexions embracing the earth.
Students painted Angelou and the hands later that year. They completed the Chávez mural in 2022.
But as Edison students put up their murals, another one came down.
Last summer, Fresno Unified painted over McLane High’s mural, which depicted a colorful sunrise and series of trees beneath the phrase “R.I.S.E. Together.” R.I.S.E. is a school motto, standing for respect, integrity, spirit, and excellence, according to the school’s site.
The district isn’t currently planning to repaint that mural, according to district spokesperson AJ Kato. But FUSD learned from its “mistake” with McLane and is “applying those lessons to the Edison situation.”
Esquivel also designed McLane’s mural. Esquivel didn’t respond to the Ed Lab’s request for comment.
Fresno school board approves paint job
The current controversy erupted about four weeks ago, as the school board weighed whether to repaint Edison. Some residents of southwest Fresno believe the school looks like a “prison” with its current color of gray. The painting would be a year ahead of schedule, in response to the prompting of the Edison area’s board trustee and southwest Fresno community members.
The high school’s area representative, Keshia Thomas, said residents have come to her with concerns about the gray paint for years.
“About 11 years ago, the administration … unilaterally decided to paint Edison High School to gray color, which upset everyone,” Thomas said at the June 21 meeting. “I didn’t come into this until 2018, and that’s when the community came to me and asked me for help. I have been there to support their will.”
Several community members expressed their frustrations with Edison’s gray exterior and advocated for the repainting at the June meeting during public comments.
“Edison High School looks like a prison,” said resident Debbie Darden, adding that the “gloomy gray color” is “mentally draining.”
Some proponents of the repainting took issue with the murals as well, calling them “unattractive graffiti.”
The murals became a sticking point in the discussion, with trustees and staff tossing around the idea of creating a mural policy to avoid confusion in the future.
Despite reservations from some trustees, the vote to move ahead with the repainting – while protecting the murals – passed 6-1. Trustee Claudia Cazares voted against the measure, having said “it’s not fair” to push one school’s project ahead of schedule.
The project is estimated to cost $770,000, district spokesperson Nikki Henry said in an email.
The vote came with the stipulation that the murals “not be touched” until the district secures consent from the mural’s designer, Esquivel, and gathers student input on the possible relocation to the interior of the school, Fresno Unified’s board president Veva Islas said.
As for gathering student feedback, Henry said the district’s Extended Learning department “will be pulling together students, the artist(s), and other critical partners to decide what will be done with the existing murals, which could include moving them to a more interior place on campus.” These and other options put together by the committee will then require final approvals from district leaders. She didn’t specify when that committee would convene.
Staff shared at the meeting that they’d made initial contact with Esquivel, and that he was open to repainting them elsewhere as long as students approved.
“The McLane experience with painting over the mural was horrendous,” Islas said at the meeting. “The district received a lot of negative attention because of that, in particular from the artistic community. So I do not want to repeat that.”
The board’s decision moves Edison up one year ahead in the typical 10- to 15-year cycle of repainting among the district’s schools, staff said. So another stipulation the board attached to the vote was that Edison would wait one extra year in the next repainting cycle.
The district will begin repainting once the superintendent awards a bid to a specific vendor. Henry deferred to the eventual vendor’s expertise on what specifically might be done to protect the murals during the repainting, but said the district’s operations team will be “clearly communicating this high priority” with them.
The plan, Trustee Thomas told the Ed Lab, is to repaint the school a cream color. The new paint job will include accents in black and gold – Edison’s historic school colors. These colors were selected through a community engagement process led by Thomas over the past year, the district confirmed.
Edison staff working over the summer told the Ed Lab they’ve observed some of the initial paint that’s been applied to the building, describing it as beige. Thomas told the Ed Lab that isn’t necessarily the final color that will be used, and that the coat that district staff have applied so far is just a mock-up.
Petition aims to protect murals
A week after the board’s decision, community members fired back with a Change.org petition.
Organized by Stefani Williams, a teacher-librarian at Edison, the petition blasts the district for not adequately consulting with the community on the decision to repaint or what to do with the murals. The petition had more than 1,700 signatures as of Monday afternoon.
She told the Ed Lab July 12 that she felt “a little bit better,” with the district publicly committing not to paint over the murals until it has gathered student feedback.
“But we don’t really trust it,” she said, “because of past actions of the board.”
Lawless, the Edison teacher, said relocating the murals inside to a less visible part of the building would be “a real shame and a loss of that cultural representation.”
The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab at its website.
This story was originally published July 19, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
