"Pan American Unity", a Mural by Diego Rivera

Now exhibited at San Francisco Museum of Modern

"Pan American Unity", a Mural by Diego Rivera

In 1940, Diego Rivera painted during four month his mural “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent”, commonly known as “Pan American Unity”. He was working on a scaffold in an airplane hangar in San Francisco before a live audience. Diego Rivera's mural headlined the main fine arts exhibition of the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in June 1940. This was his last mural in the U.S. The fresco depicts in colorful detail a past, present, and future that the artist believed were shared across North America, calling for cultural solidarity and exchange during a time of global conflict.

After the fair, “Pan American Unity” — measuring twenty-two by seventy-four feet and weighing over sixty thousand pounds — was moved to the campus of City College of San Francisco. This fabulous fresco made on ten steel-framed cement panels is now on view at the Roberts Family Gallery in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until summer 2023, the mural will then return to the City College of San Francisco to be installed in a new performing arts center.