Rivera mural set for major move
That magnificent Diego Rivera “Pan American Unity” mural that’s been on view at City College of San Francisco since 1961 will be conserved by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and installed in its free streetside gallery as the centerpiece of a major Rivera show planned for 2020.
The Mexican master and his assistants painted this kaleidoscopic fresco-on-panels — 22 feet high and 74 feet wide, the largest he ever created — for the storied Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco’s newly built Treasure Island in 1940.
The mural, which Rivera envisioned as a “fusion between the great past of the Latin American lands, as it is deeply rooted in the soil, and the high mechanical developments of the United States,” was commissioned for the great fair by San Francisco architect Timothy Pflueger, the Moderne master who designed landmarks like Oakland’s Paramount Theatre and the old Pacific Telephone tower on New Montgomery Street.
Pflueger also designed City College, where the 10-panel mural was to hang permanently in a grand library that never got built. The architect dropped dead on the street in 1946, Rivera was shunned during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s, and the panels sat in crates at the college until 1961, when the mural went up in the lobby of the new theater.
Officially called “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on the Continent,” it draws together dancing Yaqui Indians and Shasta Dam hardhats, the plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec creator deity), Abe Lincoln, Simón Bolívar, Henry Ford, Benito Mussolini and Josef Stalin. There’s an auto plant stamping machine, and Charlie Chaplin playing Hitler in “The Great Dictator.” Chaplin’s estranged wife, actress Paulette Goddard, with whom Rivera had an affair, appears in a panel near Rivera’s ex, painter Frida Kahlo.
“SFMOMA has a long and wonderful history with Diego Rivera, including 17 solo and group exhibitions,” SFMOMA director Neal Benezra said in an announcement about the 2020 Rivera exhibition.
One of the first gifts to the museum when it was founded in 1935 — same year as City College — was Rivera’s painting “The Flower Carrier,” donated by founding trustee and Rivera patron Albert Bender.
Will Maynez, the retired City College physics lab manager who has been spearheading an effort to build a new home on campus worthy of Rivera’s masterwork, wrote to the Friends of Diego that the museum is generously underwriting the restoration of the mural, which he envisions in the lobby of the Performing Arts & Education Center that City College plans to build on the west side of Phelan Avenue.
That, he adds, “will finally fulfill Rivera and Pflueger’s vision: that the mural should be seen in its entirety from outside through a glass façade. The SFMOMA siting will be a titillating preview.”
For more information on the mural, go to www.rivera mural.org.
Band Together 2 provides a boost
The recent Band Together 2 benefit concert raised $4 million for the Tipping Point Emergency Relief Fund, which aims to help victims of the North Bay fires, officials announced. The evening brought out nearly 8,000 people to Bill Graham Civic Auditorium on Thursday, Dec. 14, for live performances by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real and the Glide Ensemble. More than 800 of the seats at the venue were donated to those impacted by the fires, including the team at Santa Rosa Community Health, a Tipping Point Emergency Relief Fund grantee that lost its largest facility in the firestorm.
The concert was a sequel to last month’s Band Together Bay Area at AT&T Park, which featured Metallica, G-Eazy and Dead & Company and raised $17 million.
To donate, go to www. tippingpoint.org/relief.
Gomez returns
The bracing comedian and storyteller Marga Gomez, who came of age on the Bay Area comedy scene in the 1980s, is slated to perform “Latin Standards” — billed as her 12th and final solo play — Jan. 11-28 at San Francisco’s Brava Theater.
She and director David Schweizer developed the piece, described as “a true story of perseverance and creative addiction passed down from immigrant father to lesbian daughter,” at Brava last year in advance of its premiere in New York at the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival.
For more information, go to www.brava.org.
Dance Mission gets a permanent home
Dance Mission Theater at Mission and 24th streets, started in 1998 by the feminist Dance Brigade, has found a permanent home in the Art Deco building at Mission and 18th streets, to be renovated in partnership with Mission Neighborhood Centers Inc. and the Mission Economic Development Agency, which just bought the building.
The $40 million project, designed by San Francisco architect Lisa Gelfand, includes a floor for Dance Mission (studios, a theater, offices), another floor for Mission Neighborhood Centers and 44 low-income condos. A groundbreaking ceremony is planned for December 2019.
Dance Mission Artistic Director Krissy Keefer says in her year-end letter the company still needs to raise $8 million for the project, “So vamos
a andar! Let’s get going!” For more information, go to www.dancemission.com.