The Diego Rivera Gallery and  Diego Rivera’s famous mural, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (”Making a Fresco”)(1931), can be found steps within the San Francisco Art Institute’s Chestnut Street campus.  Our address is as follow:

San Francisco Art Institute. 800 Chestnut Street. San Francisco, CA. 94133 (directions)

The Mural

The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (”Making a Fresco”)(1931) is one of four murals in the Bay Area painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

Filling the entire end wall of the gallery, the fresco is visually divided into six sections by a trompe l’oeil wood scaffold. As the title indicates, there is a fresco within the fresco showing the building of a modern city, including portraits of many of the individuals who worked on the fresco or indirectly as advisers and patrons. In the upper left section English sculptor Clifford Wight is sharpening a chisel; sculptor Ralph Stackpole (in cap with goggles) works with a pneumatic tool on the head of a monumental stone figure; wearing the same blue pants, red shirt, and cap Wight appears again on Stackpole’s right, kneeling on the scaffold. On the scaffold below them a sculptor works with a chisel on the lower section of the stone figure while two men in overalls tend a small forge at the compressor for Stackpole’s tool.

At the center of the upper central panel is Rivera, who has painted himself sitting on the scaffold with his back to the viewer, holding a paintbrush and a palette. He watches his assistants working above him: Clifford Wight again, wearing corduroy pants and a white shirt, upper left, holding one end of a vertical chalk line, and, on the upper right, holding the end of another, diagonal chalk line, which passes directly behind Rivera’s head; and Mathew Barnes, the plasterer, to Rivera’s right-applying the wet plaster ground around the largest figure in the fresco, a worker operating the control levers of a machine. Below and to the left of Rivera, Wight appears again holding the other ends of the two chalk lines. On the scaffold below Rivera stand three men wearing suits and hats, looking at a large piece of paper (from left to right): architect Timothy Pfleuger, who designed the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the location of another Rivera mural; William Gerstle, president of the San Francisco Art Association, who commissioned The Making of a Fresco; and Arthur Brown, Jr., architect of the school’s new building, Coit Tower, City Hall, and many other San Francisco landmarks.

In the upper right panel a group of three workers in blue overalls guides a red steel girder into position. Two men are suspended from a cable in the distance, with an airplane passing close above them. Three men are at work in the middle distance astride the steel beams of a skyscraper. In the lower right panel architect and painter Michael Goodman, who worked with Pfleuger, stands at the side of a drafting table, holding a scale ruler; Geraldine Colby Frickie, an architect and designer, stands behind the table, holding measuring calipers; and Albert Barrows, an engineer who turned Rivera’s sketches into full-scale cartoon stencils for the mural, bends over the table.