Jan. 6, 2025, was like any other day for Alyssa McFeat, a 6th grade student at Aveson Global Leadership Academy, a charter middle school, in Altadena, Calif. She loved that her school was nestled amid hiking trails and lush greenery, where sunflowers and pomegranates sprouted freely in its grounds, and students spent time gardening, playing, or “just chilling” in the sun.
By Jan. 8, that landscape—and Alyssa’s routine—would be gone.
Alyssa was one of the 15 students and 67 staff members who lost their homes in the Eaton fire, one of eight major wildfires that caused widespread destruction in California last year. Aveson Global Leadership Academy and the Aveson School of Leaders, an elementary school, were gone, too. Across the state, these wildfires would disrupt school for over half a million students as they raged on for close to a month, according to a news report from NPR.
“It was a really weird situation,” Alyssa said. “Besides losing my school and having to move, it was a longer commute [to school]. The campus was bigger, but the classrooms were cut in half, so we’d have, like, a curtain [in between]… It wasn’t an easy transition.”
The transition was difficult for other reasons, too, said Serafina Mangubat, a 7th grade student at Aveson. Students were “suddenly cut off” from their abundantly green environment and relocated to a campus with hard, flat concrete surfaces.
In the months that followed, students searched for ways to reconnect with their community, and recapture a sense of place.
That opportunity came around the one-year anniversary of the fires: a chance to reimagine a 100-year-old mural called “Modern Women” by an American impressionist artist called Mary Cassatt.
Originally created for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and later lost, the mural was reinterpreted by Alyssa, Serafina, and 13 other Aveson students for a new generation.
“It was amazing that we could remake it to connect with Cassatt but also add our touches to make [the campus] feel more like Aveson,” said Annika Dougall, a 6th grade student.
How a lost mural came back to life
The new mural—15 feet tall and 40 feet wide—now spans a white wall at a public school in Pasadena, where Aveson students are temporarily housed.
Like Cassatt’s original, the piece centers women in art and science. But the students’ version features modern figures such as Jane Goodall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, alongside imagery drawn from their old school.
The mural represents a “transfer of knowledge between generations of women,” said Sofia Laçin, the co-founder of Studio Tutto, and one of the artists who collaborated with Aveson on the mural. Laçin, along with co-founder Hennessey Cristophel, creates large art installations and sculptures to refresh outdoor public spaces. They were commissioned to rework the Cassatt classic by the National Gallery of Art in the District of Columbia, as part of the museum’s retrospective celebrating 100 years of American Art. “It just so happened that the anniversary of the Eaton fires coincided with the mural project,” said Laçin.
Laçin and Christophel did not share what they received as a commission, or the cost of painting the mural.
“We also embedded a lot of symbolism that was relevant to these kids and the native ecology that surrounded their school,” Laçin added. One of the panels in the triptych shows women harvesting pomegranates, a fruit that grew at the old Aveson campus.
For students, the process became a form of healing. In workshops leading up to the installation, artists brought in native plants from Altadena, and students painted while sharing stories of losing their homes, school, and, in some cases, friends who moved away.
Those early sketches shaped the final mural. Sunflowers—that once grew across their old campus—now frame the figures in the new work.
“It deepened our understanding of community,” said Arlynn Page, an Aveson arts teacher who also lost her home in the fire.
Connecting the old with the new
To Serafina and her friends, the mural became a bridge between past and present. It carries visual reminders of the landscape they lost, helping them process grief and displacement.
“You still have the hurt in your heart. When you look at [the mural], you’re like, ‘oh yeah, those are the plants I used to walk around,’” said Alyssa.
The act of creating the mural together also helped students reclaim a sense of connection with an unfamiliar space, Laçin said. She argues more schools should invest in environments that foster creativity and belonging, rather than defaulting to “asphalt, grass, hard, concrete space.”
Such projects, however, are rare. They require funding, time, and coordination that many schools lack.
Meanwhile, Aveson leaders continue searching for a permanent campus where they can rebuild the school amid intense competition for space following the fires. In the meantime, the mural serves as a reminder: even temporary spaces can be made meaningful, said Page.
For now, when students pass the mural, they see more than paint on a wall—they see evidence of their resilience.
“Even though you’re going through a really hard time,” Serafina said, “you need to accept there’s no going back. But give yourself time to feel everything … because it’s all reasonable.”
