Project Title: Look at Me When I’m Talking to You
Recipient Organization: Horace Mann Academic Middle School
Fiscal Sponsor: Friends of Photography
Lead Artist: Patrick Hebert
Genre and Date Awarded: Visual Arts, May 1996
Completed: May 1998

Photographer Patrick “Pato” Herbert collaborated with members of the school community at Horace Mann Academic Middle School in San Francisco to create a series of 14 photographic murals. The murals presented color panoramic photographs of students. One large (eight by eighteen foot piece) was placed on the school’s exterior facing Valencia Street, and the others were placed on interior walls.

For five years prior to undertaking this project, Patrick Hebert had been teaching photography at Horace Mann Academic Middle School as a paraprofessional and as an artist-in-residence, supported by the California Arts Council. While working at the school, he also had been making pictures during his lunch hour of the young people he taught. At the end of the school year, in 1994, he had exhibited a selection of his images throughout the school hallways. The exhibition was short-termed, but generated overwhelming support and enthusiasm from the school community: Two years later many students still were carrying contact prints in their wallets. This response led him to undertake a larger scale, permanent project.

New to Hebert in this collaboration were the medium of murals and the use of a medium format panoramic camera. He noted: “The wide angled and expansive space of the panoramic format enables multiple narratives to occur simultaneously within a single frame. Intimate portraiture can co-exist with the less conventional ghost like motion recorded by the panoramic camera’s moving lens.”

He also sought to address the dearth of stimulating and complex public imagery of youth, particularly young people of color, noting, “Except when targeted as a consumer group, youth rarely make it into the public visual space…even the public service announcements on billboards and bus shelters seem to be aimed at young people, not created in collaboration with them.”

Hebert’s process for his Creative Work Fund project involved multiple layers of interaction with the school community. As he took photographs, he distributed wallet-sized contact prints to students on a weekly basis, enabling them to collect and judge the imagery throughout the process. Simultaneously, he met quarterly with the school’s governing body, the Horace Mann Community Council, and monthly with a team of five teachers, and two different student advisory teams consisting of eighth graders. He also convened a selection committee comprising students, school staff, and parents, who helped to direct, edit, and mount the images. The preliminary round of edits were shared with the community in the fall of 1997, and the final fourteen images were formally unveiled in May 1998.

Horace Mann is a public middle school in San Francisco’s Mission District. While the Mission is primarily Latino, it is a racially and culturally diverse part of the city and this diversity is reflected in the 630 students attending Horace Mann. The school offers its students a range of club and extra curricular activities and is involved with numerous community organizations. The school also fills multiple roles as a public building: as part of City College of San Francisco’s Mission branch (with 400 adult students attending nightly), as an official polling site for elections, and as a meeting place frequently used by church and community groups. At the project’s outset, the school’s principal wrote, “Recently renovated and repainted, Horace Mann has a fresh but expressionless face. The proposed murals will help the school establish an unique visual identity.”

Patrick “Pato” Hebert

Professional Experience

• Associate Director of Education, Prevention, AIDS Project Los Angeles. Help to create HIV Prevention programs, publications and social marketing campaigns. (2002-Present)
• Visiting Assistant Professor in Photography, Scripps College. (2001-02)
• Art Director, No Haters Here. Helped to develop and implement a hate crime media campaign for youth, sponsored by the Los Angeles Commission on Human Relations. (2000-02)
• Artist-in-Residence, California Arts Council, sponsored by the Ansel Adams Center for Photography. Design and instruct a free after-school photography program for students at Horace Mann Academic Middle School (1994-96)
• Bilingual Paraprofessional, Horace Mann Academic Middle School, San Francisco Unified School District (1993-96)
• Photographer, Artist, Graphic Consultant, Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida, National Task Force on AIDS Prevention, based in the queer Latino community (1994-97)

Solo Exhibitions

• “revertido,” Voz Alta, San Diego, CA. (2003)
• “somoson,” Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, CA. (2003)
• “Mariposas,” Art Gallery, University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA. (1999)
• “Untitled Images from the Horace Mann Series,” Horace Mann Middle School, San Francisco, California (1994)

Group Exhibitions

• “The Labyrinth of Light,” Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City, Mexico. (2003)
• “Photo Salon,” Queer Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA. (2003)
• “Finding Family Stories,” CA African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. (2003)
• “Finding Family Stories,” Self-Help Graphics, Los Angeles, CA. (2003)
• “Finding Family Stories,” Japanese American National Museum, LA, CA. (2003)
• “Faculty Show,” Scripps College, Claremont, CA. (2002)
• “Tierra Incognita,” Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles, CA. (2002)
• “Gender, Geneaology, and Counter Memory,” MACLA, San Jose, CA. (2001)
• “America Foto Latina,” Museo de Las Artes, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México. (2000)

Awards

• Rockefeller Humanities Residency Fellowship, California State University, Los Angeles (2005)
• Artist Resource for Completion Award, Durfee Foundation (2003)
• Arts Education Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts and the Council for Basic Education (1996)
• Individual Artist’s Residency, California Arts Council, Artist Serving Special Constituents Award (1994-97)