The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday afternoon to initiate landmark designation for the 1931 Diego Rivera mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City located inside the San Francisco Art Institute’s Chestnut Street campus.
Sponsored by District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the resolution addressed recent concern that the SFAI board of trustees was considering removing and selling the mural, appraised at $50 million, to cover the institution’s looming $19.7 million debt. That debt is to be repaid to the University of California within six years. Recent coverage by the New York Times identified the potential buyer as George Lucas’ Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.
While the SFAI board of trustees has emphasized its “desire to keep the mural where Rivera originally painted it,” as board chair Pam Rorke Levy wrote in a Jan. 11 letter to the supervisors, they opposed today’s initiation of landmark designation.
Instead, Levy asked that the supervisors to delay their decision “for at least a month,” explaining that “landmarking the mural now will prevent us from using it—SFAI’s only significant asset—to secure the $7 million bridge loan we need to make it through the pandemic and rebuild our enrollment over the next two years.”
Article 10 of the San Francisco Planning Code outlines the purposes of landmark designation “to promote the health, safety and general welfare of the public,” by protecting sites “that are reminders of past eras, events and persons important in local, state or national history.”
