What’s at stake?
There aren’t enough historic photos of West Fresno in the public archives, local educators and experts say. But a new public art project could help carve out new space for those images.
As a kid, Ronda Kelley remembers seeing Napoleon riding around West Fresno.
Not the pillaging French emperor, but a much more welcome visitor to her side of town in the ’70s. In West Fresno, Napoleon sold fruits and vegetables out of his truck when there weren’t any grocery stores you could get to without having to “hop the freeway,” she said.
“I don’t even know his real name,” said Kelley, who now teaches African American Studies at Fresno City College. “My parents might know.”
Napoleon is a recurring figure in Kelley’s and other West Fresno residents’ memories. But you’d be hard pressed to find any photo or mention of him in old newspaper clippings.
Those West Fresno-shaped holes in the public archives aren’t limited to individuals like Napoleon. Even longtime businesses in the neighborhood say they’ve made sure to document important moments through the years when no one else was.
“We don’t exist, as far as the city’s concerned,” said Michelle Ethridge-Meyers, who took over her family’s daycare, Bambi’s Day Care Nursery, 40-odd years ago. The business has been open since 1969 and has taken care of multiple generations of West Fresno’s children.
“I know we have pictures of Bambi’s when it was built, only because they did a grand opening and all of that. Nobody from the mayor’s office came,” she added, “but a couple of councilmen at that time came. We’ve had to keep up with our own pictures because … you know, they forget about us.”
This isn’t an uncommon experience for the communities of Fresno that grew up on the west side of the tracks, said Elizabeth Laval, president of the Fresno City & County Historical Society.
“There aren’t as many photographs as we would hope to have” of those communities, she said, including Fresno’s earliest Black residents, as well as Armenians, Italians, Chinese, Japanese and Latino folks, to name a few.
But with a new public art project underway at Fresno City College’s West Fresno Center campus, a team of artists is looking to change that.
Kelley, along with Fresno City College instructors Elena Harvey Collins, Hiromi Iyoda and Caleb Duarte, are working on an installation they hope will carve out new space — literally — for those West Fresno landmarks.
The project will take the form of a “ceramic quilt” — made up of a combination of glazed tiles and sculptural relief — adorning the fountain and reflecting pool in front of the West Fresno Center on Church Avenue.
Each six-by-six tile Duarte will sculpt for the project is a canvas on which a West Fresno icon can be memorialized — if not in the local archives, then in public art.
But the challenge is that they still need photos or descriptions of the places they’re trying to represent.
Laval’s Historical Society has shared some old photos with the artists so far, including a photo of a group of women at the Second Baptist Church of Fresno (holding a quilt that helped inspire the design).
Now, the team is also turning to West Fresno families to help fill in those archival gaps.
They launched a community survey in early September with the goal of collecting more of those photos from families who’ve held onto them.
Duarte believes the quilt-inspired design, in combination with what they gather from “oral histories, word of mouth (and) personal archives,” will help tell the story of West Fresno in a way that institutions haven’t captured.
“With the whole idea of quilting, it’s like this juxtaposition of two different fabrics or textures of fabric, right? But instead of textures, we’re dealing with images,” he said. “Even if we put one image next to an opposite image, the conversation between the two will create a cool story. Like, say, a low rider next to a church.
“The quilting starts to tell a larger story.”
‘Quite a list of places’
Residents’ memories of West Fresno have been shaping the project from the beginning.
Teresa Flores, the artist who led the project in its early days, conducted 11 video interviews with residents during an engagement event at BBQ Bob’s in 2022 — all of which were maintained by the Community Media Access Collaborative (CMAC).
That research was the starting point for the four-person project team that took over in late 2024, said Harvey Collins.
The survey marks the next phase.
“We do have quite a list of places, and some people, that came up during the research phase of the project,” she said. “I’m really hopeful that we’re going to get some of those images emailed.”
The tiles will likely depict more places than people, Harvey Collins added, to “avoid getting into a situation where some people are included and other people are not.”
But there are some exceptions who she wants to see get a tile in the final design, including Napoleon.
“I heard that name keep coming up, and I’m really hopeful someone out there has a photograph,” she said, “or can provide us with a description that is good enough that we can make a drawing.”
‘We raised half of West Fresno’
Some of the places the artists are hoping to represent in the art installation are now closed, making the search more difficult.
That includes now-shuttered businesses, like the family-owned grocery store Louis Kee Market and J&C House of Records.
“You’re talking about an urban environment that’s often changing. Buildings get lost,” said Harvey Collins of the difficulty finding archival photos of old West Fresno businesses. “They’re not documented.”
But residents have also pointed to other locations they want to see honored through the project that are still open today.
That includes Jesse E. Cooley Jr. Funeral Home, which is Fresno’s oldest Black-owned business, ABC30 reported. The funeral home has served grieving West Fresno families since 1941.
That also includes Bambi’s Day Care Nursery.
“We raised half of West Fresno,” said Ethridge-Meyers, who inherited the business from her mother and aunt. “We’re on fourth-generation kids now.”
Kelley was one of those children who went to Bambi’s when she was younger.
As both a consultant on the project and a resident with deep ties to West Fresno, she hopes the eventual design and all the West Fresno icons it invokes will teach some West Fresno Center students who might be encountering that history for the first time.
“Maybe it will also prompt a little bit of research, even if it’s a simple Google,” she added, “to be able to know a little bit more about the people who have contributed to the greater westside of Fresno.”
How you can help preserve West Fresno icons
The team will be collecting survey responses through mid-October.
You can access the survey online. Or, if you stop by the West Fresno Center, there are poster boards with information about the project near the fountain that also have a QR code linking to the survey, Harvey Collins said.
Kelley said residents are also welcome to send her images directly via email at ronda.kelley@fresnocitycollege.edu.
The artists are aiming to finish the design and the tiles for the installation by the end of the fall semester in December.
They hope to then install the tiles and host a celebration for the completed project in February 2026.
