Dear Friends of Diego,
The long-awaited Diego Rivera Theatre will break ground on Thursday, January 22, 2026 from 2 to 3:30 pm. in STEAM 101 (the event has reached capacity). The 30-month construction project will finally give the Pan American Unity mural a fitting home. It will be on the western side of Frida Kahlo Way on the major east-west axis architect Timothy Pflueger inscribed through Science Hall. In 1940 Pflueger’s Science building housed the entire College academic and administrative functions.
It’s been a long haul for the mural, a product of the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition’s Art in Action program on Treasure Island. It was originally intended to be placed in the reading room of a grand library that was to be Pflueger’s next major City College project. The 74-foot-long buon fresco mural, painted on wet plaster, would form the center third of a larger mural, the rest of which would be painted in situ and not require steel-framed panels. Since that library project was still on the drawing boards, the question arose of where to store the mural panels. Both the DeYoung museum and the Palace of Fine Arts balked at the cost to move the heavy mural inside. Finally, in 1942 the 10 crated mural panels were stored at City College in a shed adjacent to the old men’s gym. The five upper 14’9″ square panels were the largest which could be shipped across the Bay Bridge in a vertical orientation, necessary due to the fragility of the fresco plaster. The five lower panels were half-height. Now the mural was tantalizingly close to its destination, but history always writes its own stories. When the US entered the war in late 1941, building materials were unavailable for non-essential construction. Soon after the war ended, Timothy Pflueger died on Post Street after a swim at the Olympic Club. It was not until 1961 that the mural was installed in the Little Theatre designed by Milton Pflueger, Timothy’s younger brother. At the fair the mural was displayed flat, elevated 14 feet. The accommodations to make the mural fit into the narrow theatre lobby were to curve the wall and have the mural panels form a stepped curve with the bottom edge elevated three feet off the ground. Embedding the mural into the wall with steel rods functionally made the installation “permanent”. The concept of the mural’s longevity had not yet entered the design. In 1999 Francesca Piqué from the Getty Conservation Institute was invited to evaluate the mural. She had just done work at the Vatican and was impressed by the vibrancy of the colors and the quality of Rivera’s work. She admonished me to think of taking care of the mural for the next 200 years. We cannot assign a value to the tremendous work done by SFMOMA, Atthowe, Sheedy Crane, Nichols Concrete, and the multi-disciplinary team from Mexico City’s UNAM in safely extricating the fragile mural from its problematic anchorage. The collaboration embodied Rivera’s dream of Pan American Unity. Now, provisions are designed to make the mural easier to install and to de-install in some distant future. This issue of long stewardship is currently being addressed in the care of Mexico City’s giant modernist mosaics, including Rivera’s.
Photo courtesy Christopher Stork
Christopher Stork recently contacted me. He had acquired four 11″ x 14″ photographic glass plates, which were a full color separation of a mural image at Treasure Island. The photo was taken after Dudley Carter’s Goddess of the Forest, which had been in the way, was removed. The image was shot from across the room on the scaffolding for Herman Volz’s Organic and Inorganic Science mosaic, which now adorns the north portico of Pflueger’s Science Hall. Diego climbed Volz’s scaffolding daily to get an eye-level look at his own work in progress. Christopher’s question was whether these plates represented the images for the Life magazine, March 3, 1941 (page 52) pictorial. Another possibility was that they were for the poster that Timothy Pflueger wanted to print to raise funds for the expanded mural. Though we had a copy of a previous poster, it was a later version done most likely before the advent of the internet. Art Digest had also been interested in getting images. Above is a digital reproduction of the Black negative plate. (Christopher is interested in any insights from readers.)
Below is the almost finished Goddess at the GGIE Art in Action program. After the Fair, the Goddess was mounted in GG Park, where the lower 10 feet rotted due to an improper installation. The Goddess was acquired in 1986, truncated per Dudley’s specification, restored, and mounted in the lobby of the Diego Rivera Theatre, opposite the mural. When we tried to photograph the mural in 1999, it was again in the way. So, each combined upper and lower panels were shot individually and the film digitized. The five images were “stitched” together to depict the entire mural for use on the mural website and printed materials. The Goddess will find a new home near the mural, but not in front of it. Dudley Carter’s Mountain Ram, carved first and depicted in the mural, was recently installed in City College’s new Student Success Center.
Goddess at GGIE, Unknown photographer
Questions of how to display the mural came up as the new theater design evolved. To protect the mural it was suggested, that it be placed eight feet above the floor. Pflueger’s original design was to have the mural 14 feet off the ground over the library book stacks. But this idea had not been thought out and had it been built, I believe Pflueger and Rivera would have been disappointed. Neither ever saw the mural again. Moreover, a reading room is quiet and not suited to student docents explaining the mural to visitors. Having seen many Rivera murals in Mexico, they often start at or very near the ground. Some said that the higher positioning was the artist’s intent. However, as Diego said about painting a mural: “You choose the wall, or take what is offered without a choice in the matter.” There was nothing in the figures that implied a preferred point of view. In fact, in letters to Rivera, Pflueger wrote that as you climbed some external adjacent stairs, you’d reach points where you got a good view at mural level. SFMOMA, which graciously supported my arguments, finally made the issue moot. They displayed the mural in the Roberts Family Gallery one foot off the ground. For 2-½ years 600,000 patrons were able to enjoy the mural up close and also from a distance. Many children and people in wheelchairs were able to have an intimate look at the lower panels, brush strokes and all. My favorite mural tour was for a legally blind woman. She could get close enough to see blobs of color and we’d discuss what she was seeing.
Since this mural can last centuries, on our watch we will pass the masterpiece to the future in pristine condition. During the duration of the construction project, the two lead art conservators, Kiernan Graves and Anne Rosenthal, and their team, who have overseen the work on the mural up to now, will continue to monitor the work every 6 months, so there are no “surprises”, when it is time to install it.
This year MoMA’s Frida and Diego: The Last Dream will undertake a joint effort including the Met’s new production of El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego (May 14–June 5, 2026), composed by Gabriela Lena Frank with a libretto by Pulitzer prize winner Nilo Cruz. The opera which ran in San Francisco during the mural’s SFMOMA exhibition allowed visiting opera lovers from all over the world to see the mural. I gave a tour to the opera creators and was invited to see the opera three times. (Gabriela Lena Frank will debut a new Diego and Frida-based string quartet piece in February.)
Frida is as always in the news. In November her El Sueño (La Cama) set a record for a woman artist selling at $54.7M. Even a 2″ portrait was offered for sale at $15M by San Francisco’s Weinstein Gallery. The Frida Kahlo Foundation, based in New York, but involved with the new Museo Casa Kahlo, is proposing a new strategy of making digital twins of Frida’s paintings. This is a work around for the Mexican law which makes her works part of the national patrimony, which prohibits the works leaving Mexico, but also dissuades loans to Mexico of Frida’s works held outside the country.
El Sueño (La Cama) photo by Sotheby’s
Our mural can be investigated in extraordinary detail at Stanford hosts scientific images of Diego Rivera’s Pan American Unity Mural. Cultural Heritage Imaging will soon announce the Stanford website for the photogrammetry shoot of the SFAI Rivera mural. So far, logistical constraints have prevented a photogrammetric shoot of the Rivera mural at the City Club.
