Pan American Unity is a mural painted by Mexican artist and muralist Diego Rivera for the Art in Action exhibition at Treasure Island's Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) in San Francisco, California in 1940. This work was the centerpiece of the Art In Action exhibit, which featured many different artists engaged in creating works during the Exposition while the public watched.
History
Pan American Unity, a true fresco, was painted locally in San Francisco on commission for San Francisco Junior College during the second session of GGIE, held in the summer of 1940. At the time of the mural commission, college leadership had planned on installing it at the yet-to-be-built Pflueger Library after the closing of the 1939–1940 GGIE. Pflueger had designed the library with the intent that Rivera's mural would cover three walls; the mural as-completed would be mounted on the south wall of the library's reading room, and Rivera intended to return once the library was complete to add murals to the west and east walls. Both the San Francisco Art Commission and Board of Education received protests over the mural's content before its completion, primarily because of the included caricatures of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The Art Commission approved the artistic merit in August 1940 but deferred the judgement of appropriate subject matter to the Board of Education. Pflueger announced that Rivera would continue to work on the mural for "at least another week" after the close of GGIE.
Rivera completed the mural three months after the close of GGIE, and 32,000 automobiles came to Treasure Island with up to 100,000 visitors to view the completed work on Sunday, December 1. The mayor of San Francisco, surveying the crowd, quipped "This Rivera is more popular than Wendell Willkie." The San Francisco Arts Commission accepted the mural in January 1941. After its showing in early December, the mural was crated and stored on Treasure Island.
While in storage, the de Young Museum declined to take the mural in 1941, as it was too large to move conventionally; the cost to lower the panels through a skylight was cited as the reason to decline it. That year, while extinguishing a hangar fire on Treasure Island, one of the crates was pierced by a fireman's axe, leaving a gash near the portrait of Sarah Gerstel in Section 5. Pflueger wrote to Rivera, who offered to repair the damage, but he never had the opportunity. The crated pieces were moved into storage at the college in June 1942, next to the men's gym. Emmy Lou Packard, Rivera's primary assistant on the mural, examined the damage but did not repair it at the time, instead choosing to wait for the installation of the mural in the library. However, with the start of the Second World War, the construction of the library was postponed to save materiel for wartime manufacturing, and after Pflueger's death in 1945, shelved indefinitely.
After Milton Pflueger (the younger brother of Timothy) was given the commission to design the CCSF campus theater in 1957, he proposed his initial design for the theater lobby should be expanded to accommodate the mural in the new facility. Emmy Lou Packard returned to repair the damage after the theater was completed in 1961, and Mona Hoffman, another one of Rivera's assistants on the original work was unable to distinguish the repair, to Packard's delight.
The current library at CCSF, which opened in 1995, was designed with a four-story atrium to hold the mural, but it was not moved amid concerns of potential damage. In 1999, a Getty Conservation Institute expert chided college personnel to consider the next two hundred years, and the artist's daughter, Guadalupe Rivera Marín challenged CCSF to construct a building dedicated to the mural. A conceptual building was designed by Jim Diaz of KMD Architects in 2012 to house the mural.
Technical
The mural was created on 10 robust steel-framed panels bolted together and weighing about in total. It was deliberately designed to be portable, as it would have to be moved to the college campus from Treasure Island after completion, and others have speculated Rivera made it portable after the destruction of Man at the Crossroads. At , it is his largest contiguous work and it completely spans the narrow lobby of the college's Diego Rivera Theater.
Assistants
Rivera was assisted in the project by Thelma Johnson Streat, an African-American artist and textile designer. Life magazine also noted the assistance of Mona Hoffman, and Rivera later wrote a letter to the editor crediting Emmy Lou Packard and Arthur Niendorff as his chief assistants.