In June 2021, one of the most important works of public art ever created in the Bay Area was rescued from semi-oblivion. Diego Rivera’s enormous 1940 fresco Pan American Unity, which had languished inside a poorly lit theater building at City College of San Francisco, was unveiled in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s free Roberts Family Gallery. It had taken four years of preparation and seven trips to move the colossal panels by truck. SFMOMA will display the mural until summer 2023, when it will be returned to a new performing arts center on the City College campus. The museum is also mounting the exhibition Diego Rivera’s America—more than 160 artworks and objects that reflect his visits to the United States and life in Mexico—which will run from this July through January 2023.
Pan American Unity (whose actual title is The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent) is not the only fresco Rivera painted in San Francisco that has made headlines recently. In January 2021, the San Francisco Art Institute considered selling its own Rivera fresco, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. The proposed sale was greeted with widespread outrage and led the city to award the mural landmark status, thus preventing it from being removed.
This flurry of publicity could only have occurred in San Francisco. It’s one of the three U.S. cities where Rivera created frescoes. One in New York City was destroyed on the orders of Nelson Rockefeller in 1933; those in Detroit were funded by Edsel B. Ford of Ford Motor Company and continue to hang inside the city’s Institute of Arts.
Rivera created and another mural, , which hangs inside the City—during another stay. This second trip, nine years later, took place under much darker conditions for both Rivera and Kahlo. The three frescoes reflect the circumstances of two tumultuous periods in the artists’ lives.
