History in the details: IVCC dedicates 100th anniversary mural

Students side-by-side collaborating tells the story of a century of Illinois Valley Community College – and its future.

As part of the college’s centennial celebration, IVCC President Tracy Morris dedicated the mural on Tuesday after four months of production.

Morris said the mural represents the colleges past as LPO (La Salle-Peru-Oglesby) Junior College, which was housed at La Salle-Peru High School when it opened in 1924.

The artwork was paid for by the IVCC Foundation.

In the mural, La Salle-Peru High School settles in the sepia (vintage) background of the former students working over a typewriter transitioning in a purple silver haze into future students working over laptops in front of the current IVCC building.

The finished mural painted by Westclox Studios Ray Paseka and his assistants Morgan Phillips and Emily Mays, both IVCC alumnae, is meant to serve as a reminder of what the college has meant to the community in the past, what it is in the present, and what it will be in the future.

“The concept of folks on a typewriter and on a computer, those are both mediums for transmitting ideas,” Paseka said. “And the concept hit me very quickly that if I had them having a brainstorm or an explosion of ideas.”

“The thinking from the past,” he said. “Is just as valid as thinking contemporary.”

Paseka said he wanted a contemporary approach to the concept of the mural and he looked at the textures and the wall colors in the college prior.

“I started browsing imagery,” Paseka said. “And the idea hit me. That I could do a mirrored reflection showing contemporary with something 100 years ago and tie it in visually.”

Morris said she loved the detail of the mural, specifically the dots – which represent all of the programs of study with icons.

“They took the time to do it right,” she said. “So, if you look on the left where they are in the antique, those are all the old programs of study from when we had LPO. If you go to the right in the purple and the blue those are the programs of study we have now.”

There are 160 programs represented, 11 presidents initials, and four key donors all represented throughout the mural in the dots.

“All of those dots have different significance,” Morris said. “And I think that’s the beauty of what Ray, Morgan and Emily brought to this project.”