My daughter and I are being recognized with noted muralist AG Sano at the 1980 PCMC (Philippine Children's Medical Center) in Quezón City.
The PCMC opened in 1980, with murals by the Spanish-Filipino painters, Victor Cabisada Jr. & Peter Alcántara (born 1925),. However over the decades, the murals and art installations had degraded.
In 2008, the designer Feanne Hontiveros Mauricio created new artworks for one of the wards within the PCMC, which inspired Mai Valera and Ella Ladignon, enterprising friends and former patients of the PCMC, to launched the “Walls of Hope” program in 2009 to restore the damaged facilities and murals and create news paintings with the help of volunteers from the professional and student art communities. From the 19th to the 21st of December 2009, professional artists and students volunteered their talents in creating new murals for those that were too damaged to save, while other artists worked on the restoration of the Cabisada and Alcántara murals.
In those three days, I brought my students from the Far Eastern University (FEU) Institute of Architecture and Fine Arts (IARFA) to participate, as part of their NSTP (National Service Training Program).
Amado Guerrero “AG” Saño is an internationally recognized environmental advocacy muralist, whose body of work often feature sea creatures, specifically cetaceans (dolphins and whales). Originally taking architecture at the University of the Philippines (U.P.), Saño’s foray into environmental art started when he worked as a photographer for a marine research project of WWF-Philippines, in the Babuyan Islands. His exposure to the plight of the whales and dolphins, especially about the annual slaughter of dolphins in Japan, lead Saño to start a campaign to raise awareness of the endangerment of these marine mammals. Starting with a goal to paint 12,000 all over the Philippines, Saño’s works have graced the walls of many private and public institutions, locally and internationally, working side-by-side with local volunteers.
For more information about the Philippine Children's Medical Center, I wrote the blog article: “Quezón Avenue, Quezón City: The History and Art of the Philippine Children’s Medical Center” (https://lakansining.wordpress.com/2020/09/24/quezon-avenue-quezon-city-the-history-and-art-of-the-philippine-childrens-medical-center/)
This picture was taken circa 2010
