See it while you can: After MOMA run, historic Diego Rivera headed to storage until 2027

Five days a week, Will Maynez makes a pilgrimage from his Mission District home to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to view a massive Diego Rivera mural.

The piece by the famed Mexican artist, commonly known as Pan American Unity, lived in relative obscurity in a community college theater lobby for nearly 60 years before making its heralded debut two years ago at the museum.

“This is the best that this mural has ever been presented,” said Maynez, a retired lab manager who has made it his mission to protect the painting — the only one of three Rivera murals in San Francisco that is currently on public display. “It’s available 24/7 and you can look right in from the (gallery’s) windows. I’d come back from Giants home games at night and I can stop by and take a peek.”

But that won’t last. As part of an agreement between SFMOMA and the City College of San Francisco, the precious fresco, created by Rivera during the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1940, is on loan to the museum until March as the college builds the mural’s next home at the new Diego Rivera Theatre.

But due to multiple financial and logistical delays, construction hasn’t even begun, which means that the mural is likely destined for storage until the project is finished, either in 2026 or 2027, depending on who one asks. According to Alan Wong, City College of San Francisco’s board of trustees president, the best-case scenario is construction will begin fall of 2024 and finish in summer-to-fall of 2026. But the firm behind the project says it could be another year.

Rivera captivated the world in the 1920s and 1930s with his large scale fresco murals that told the stories of the common man, including factory workers, farmers and children, and how their work laid the foundations for modern civilization. He created murals because it made art accessible to everyone, and his work inspired generations of artists, including those in San Francisco’s Mission District.

As an outspoken communist, Rivera also frequently enraged others with his politics. When he came to San Francisco in 1930 to paint a mural at the Pacific Stock Exchange — now the City Club of San Francisco — people couldn’t believe a communist was going to paint in the city’s “citadel of capitalism.”

In Rivera’s own words, Pan American Unity depicts “the marriage of the artistic expression of the North and South on this continent” and includes figures from all walks of life such as Indigenous Mexicans, the U.S.’ founding fathers, and even a portrait of the painter Frida Kahlo, one of Rivera’s wives — representing the past, present and future. The 22-by-74-foot fresco was created on 10 steel-framed cement panels so it could be moved after the fair to a new library designed by noted architect Timothy Pflueger on the CCSF campus.

Except that library was never built. Maynez says that the mural stayed in a shed at the college until it was rediscovered around the time of Rivera’s death in 1957. The panels were installed in the college’s curved theater lobby in 1961.

With Pan American Unity potentially gone from view, all three of San Francisco’s Rivera murals would be off-limits. Public tours to view Rivera’s Allegory of California mural at the City Club are currently suspended, and his Building of a City mural at the San Francisco Art Institute — normally open to the public — is closed off due to the institute’s bankruptcy. It is unclear when the city club or art institute murals will become available to the public again.

Pan American Unity has been on display at SFMOMA since June 2021. By the time the exhibit closes in March, Maynez estimates that around 300,000 people will have seen it.

Maynez has become a tireless booster, talking to thousands of people about this mural, giving tours to everyone from schoolchildren to politicians such as the Canadian Consul General and the Mexican Ambassador to the U.S.

On a recent visit to SFMOMA, 16-year-old Meadow Mihok saw the mural with her 79-year-old grandmother, Iris Sabre. Mihok said that putting the mural into storage felt like hiding an important piece of history.

“I think it’s really sad,” she said. “It describes our relationships with other countries in the Americas, and I think it’s important because a lot of times, we don’t learn about our whole history – especially the darker parts.”

Other museum-goers looked on the brighter side. San Francisco resident Jamie Kravitz, 57, and his husband meet up in front of the mural with his sister-in-law once a month to catch up.

“It’s a shame. But it needs to be protected,” Kravitz said. “I’m happy it has a future home where it will be on display.”

Once it leaves SFMOMA, the mural will likely be stored in the lobby of the community college’s old theater. It wasn’t the only option, but the college decided it ended up making the most sense, despite mold and previous flooding problems in the main auditorium area.

“We looked all over the city, and places would say, ‘Oh yeah we want it’ but they couldn’t get it through their front doors,” said Madeline Mueller, chair of the college’s Music and Theatre Arts Department. Mueller also noted that experts looked through the lobby and determined it was safe to keep the art there.

The mural weighs more than 60,000 pounds. Moving it requires driving a truck at 5 mph at night through the city because any major movement could cause damage. Treasure Island Museum also offered to hold onto the mural for a bit. While it would’ve been a full-circle moment for the piece that Rivera created on the island, the mural would have to be transported by barge, which Mueller said wasn’t going to happen.

While the mural may be hidden from public view for awhile, Mueller said it will be the cherished centerpiece of its eventual new home.

“We’ve done so many productions about Frida and Diego. I’ve seen people go from the audience to see the mural and they just get all excited because they’re immersed in that whole culture and in the arts,” Mueller said. “So I tell myself, ‘Glass half full, it’s a perfect solution.’”

Staff writer Elissa Miolene contributed to this story.