Building on Rivera’s legacy
Ever since its creation in 1931, Diego Rivera’s social-realist mural “The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City” has attracted art-pilgrimaging tourists who still flock daily to the San Francisco Art Institute to view the towering trompe l’oeil depiction of laborers constructing a growing city.
What is lesser known is that Rivera’s mural has “a remarkable history of attracting and spurring interventions by artists who have played with the mural’s curious history and iconic status,” says Hesse McGraw, the Art Institute’s vice president for exhibitions and public programs.
Successful alumni Rigo 90 and Miguel Calderon are among those who have previously created their own works in the Diego Rivera Gallery to engage with, confront or interpret the epic image. An anonymous student-provocateur in the mid-1980s applied in toothpaste a hammer and sickle to the fresco, which went undiscovered until a restoration project at least 10 years later.
Now Mexico City artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda has used Rivera’s mural as a catalyst for his own deliberately playful and visually arresting installation, “Change the World or Go Home.” Pereda, 38, has constructed a 24-foot-high fluorescent scaffolding through which we can view, and perhaps question, our traditional perspectives on Rivera’s work and, more broadly, Latin American artistic practice.
“Alejandro sees Diego himself as a kind of playful trickster, and his pose in the fresco as an adventurous retort to American culture,” says McGraw, staring up at Pereda’s creation on a recent weekday morning when, as if on cue, tourists enter the gallery and are caught by surprise by the intriguing new artwork on display simultaneously with the famous one in their guidebooks.
Pereda based his new work on a recently discovered blueprint of the original, functional scaffold, as well as a photo of Rivera sitting on the temporary 193031 scaffold with banker-philanthropist and Art Institute President William Gerstle.
“Scaffolds can imply progress, but also demolition. It’s interesting that this fresco was painted at a time when San Francisco was being reconstructed, but in a sense the city is always being reconstructed,” says McGraw.
“From a more critical perspective, Alejandro is also commenting on Mexican muralism itself as a force that has limited the development of other forms of expression.”
Pereda, a Harker Award-sponsored artistin-residence at the institute since March, has also transformed the art school’s Walter and McBean Galleries into the installation “Everything But the Kitchen Sank” — an active studio where he has been working with students all summer to create unusual underwater still lifes.
Within a massive water tank, Pereda submerges everyday objects — fruit, glassware, driftwood, masks — into beautiful, shape-shifting arrangements that play with the viewer’s orientation to gravity and buoyancy.
Pereda’s resulting photo and video documentation reveals his curiosity about “volatility and impending disaster, something about to fall or on the brink of destruction,” says McGraw. “He creates situations that trick your eye and trick your mind into questioning what you are actually seeing.”
“Scaffolds can imply progress, but also demolition. ... In a sense, the city is always being reconstructed.”
Hesse McGraw, Art Institute