The nonprofit, which provides job training and placement for people with disabilities, has been collaborating with the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, or RCAH, as well as the MSU College of Engineering, since 2010 as a part of Art@Work.

The project consists of a public art display at Peckham Inc.’s location, 3510 Capital City Blvd., in Lansing. Art@Work, which was unveiled to the public Saturday, will eventually cover the entire wall, with work commissioned by local artists and MSU students.

Most of the work is made up of both traditional and contemporary portraits of clients of Peckham Inc., which Vincent Delgado said was the optimum art medium.

“These portraits memorialize and document a process that our students and client artists went through together,” he said. “Portraits really help people think about who they are in the way that other mediums don’t necessarily do. You take all these stories together, what you have is a gigantic novel about what this collaboration really is.”

Vincent Delgado, the academic specialist for civic engagement in RCAH, said he coordinated with Peckham Inc. Art Program Developer Sue McGuire to bring student involvement during the entire process.

“Early on, we began putting a couple of amazing artists together to begin to respond to a real exciting and interesting challenge,” Vincent Delgado said. “It led to bringing students in and them working with the client artists at Peckham, and we had classes to help students understand community-based art and its role in affecting positive social change.”

McGuire said she wanted to give her clients a method of communication through the project.

“I thought it would be really cool to have their voice heard through art,” she said.

But for Guillermo Delgado, it was all about telling their own stories.

“I wanted a spotlight on people’s narratives,” he said. “My hope is that these stories make us look closely at the community around us.”