Empowering Youth Through Education

In keeping with the Art Deco-inspired architectural design of Pablo Antonio, the artist Antonio Dumlao was commissioned to render a mural at the second floor of the Administration Building that would convey the vision and mission of FEU. The year of the commission, 1949, was significant, for it had only been a few years since the destruction of Manila and the city was in the midst of rebuilding itself from the destruction of that recent war. Empowering of the Youth through Education was steeped in the design aesthetics of the times, Art Deco

The work can be distilled into a single-word motif: progress. To achieve this visually, Dumlao illuminates the figure of a woman in a white terno, raising on her left palm a miniaturized Nicanor Reyes Hall, while her other hand clutches a wreath of laurel leaves. Another woman stands beside her, like a mirror image, with her face turned sideways in profile, as though a sentinel stationed in her watch, thus representing the fortitudinous spirit of FEU. Simultaneously, she stands above the distinctive FEU seal that is in solar flare.