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Diego Rivera painted the “Pan American Unity” fresco at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Credit…Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, via City College of San Francisco.
Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times has a featured article this morning reporting on a project to move a massive Diego Rivera mural across San Francisco for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). For decades the monumental 10-panel fresco by Diego Rivera depicting a continent linked by creativity has been mounted in the lobby of a theater at City College of San Francisco. There, somewhat tucked away from the art world, it has been cared for as a labor of love by a de facto guardian who has long dreamed of finding a way to allow more people to experience it.
Now, after a four-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking involving mechanical engineers, architects, art historians, fresco experts, art handlers and riggers from the United States and Mexico, the 30-ton, 74-foot-wide-by-22-foot mural has been carefully extracted and moved to the SFMOMA, where it will go on display on June 28.
“Diego was building a metaphoric bridge between the Mexican culture and the tech culture of the United States,” said Will Maynez, the former lab manager of the physics department at City College, who became the unlikely guardian of the work, which is owned by the College.
Maynez, who is Mexican American, has spent 25 years researching and promoting the fresco, “Pan American Unity.” Its panels are a kaleidoscope of Rivera’s thoughts: the looming goddess of earth, Coatlicue; Mexican artisans; American industrialists; historical leaders of both nations; dictators; Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, and himself. Its full title is “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent.”
Moving the fresco to SFMOMA was a mammoth undertaking.
“This is one of the most ambitious things this museum has ever done — to move something this large, this fragile and this important,” said Neal Benezra, the director of the museum. Paco Link, the project manager for the fresco, likened the fresco to “a 70-foot eggshell.” (The work will be exhibited in a free gallery on the first floor of the museum as it prepares for its “Diego Rivera’s America” exhibition, which opens next year; the mural will remain on view at the museum until sometime in 2023 and will then be returned to the college. A new performing arts center, funded by a voter-approved bond measure, will house the fresco.
It is not the first time the giant fresco has been moved.
Thousands of people watched Rivera paint it at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Plans to expand the mural and make it the centerpiece of a library at the college were derailed by World War II. For years, it was stashed in a shed at the college. In 1961 it was moved to the campus theater building, now called Diego Rivera Theater (at 50 Frida Kahlo Way).
Most interesting and a gift for Diego Rivera fans!
Tony
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