The San Francisco Art Institute will open in four years, but the Diego Rivera mural will remain in place

This week, details of the deal, which the United States had been waiting for since the fall, became known. Back at the end of February, news leaked to the press that the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), which declared itself bankrupt two years ago, was bought out by a group of philanthropists led by Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs. It has now been announced that the campus is scheduled to open in four years, with the famous Diego Rivera mural remaining in place. The new organization will retain its educational mission, but will be non-profit. Tells Kira Dolinina.

In all the publications dedicated to saving the San Francisco Art Institute, there are two issues that are put at the forefront: the price of the contract (about $30 million) and the fate of the famous Diego Rivera mural of 1931, which was the most valuable asset of the SFAI at the time of its closure in the spring of 2022 of the year. The bankruptcy filing valued the mural at $50 million, prompting speculation that it could be sold separately from the campus. The latest news has reassured the public – Rivera’s work will remain in its place.

The campus, built in 1926, includes two buildings, a bell tower, a courtyard, a library, classrooms and galleries, among which is the Diego Rivera Gallery, which houses the mural “The Making of a Mural Showing the Construction of a City” (548×972 cm). At a quick glance, it is the main asset of SFAI – a multi-meter “altar” in honor of the intelligentsia and the proletariat, Rivera painted during the period of his active work in the USA (in San Francisco alone, two of his murals from the early 1930s and another later one – quite the gigantic “Pan American Unity” of 1940). The artist came to San Francisco with his young wife Frida Kahlo, and it was a time of a passionate romance with the States, which bombarded him with orders: San Francisco, Detroit, New York, Chicago, the promise of big money and great fame. The SFAI mural is very revealing – it is stately and calm, like never before by Rivera. After the scandal with the ban and destruction of his 1933 work for the Rockefeller Center in New York, Rivera would no longer be so confident.

However, the mural is a mural, but the history of the San Francisco Art Institute is significant in itself. The San Francisco Art Association opened in 1871, by 1874 it had 700 permanent and 100 life members and had raised sufficient funds to start an art school, which was named the California School of Design. It became one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Then its names changed several times (Mark Hopkins Art Institute, California School of Fine Arts), until in 1961 the school became the San Francisco Art Institute. This institution stood on two pillars: support for regional, Californian art and hierarchical indistinction between different types of art: they taught painting and sculpture along with photography, and then performance, all types of conceptual art and new media. That is why the names of great photographers (Eadward Muybridge, Dorothea Lang, Edward Weston) immediately catch the eye in the list of teachers at SFAI, and the name of Annie Leibovitz in the list of alumni. The history of the painting movement at SFAI is no less impressive: after the war, abstract expressionism flourished here and Mark Rothko was noted, and among the graduates of the new generation is the hip-hop singer in a baroque frame, photographer and artist Kyande Wiley.

The teaching at SFAI was excellent, but the management was extremely poor. The institute came to final bankruptcy in April 2023 with a debt of $20 million. The situation had been heating up for several years, and in the summer of 2022 the last students left their alma mater. The year before, the institute attempted to save its budget by selling Rivera’s mural. They even named a potential buyer – George Lucas, who is collecting things for his future museum in Los Angeles. However, the artistic community became a wall, and negotiations stopped. Salvation came from local artists and philanthropists who banded together as an NGO called BMAI LLC and signed the final papers to purchase SFAI on March 1 of this year. The name of Jobs’ widow graced all the news about this deal. Other participants include Stanley Gatti, former president of the San Francisco Arts Commission; Stephen Beal, former president of the California College of the Arts; Brenda Way, founder of ODC Dance Studio; David Stull, president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; Lynn Fintech, president of Los Angeles Liberty Building Co. Details of the management and organizational structure of the future institution are still unknown. David Stull confirmed to the San Francisco Chronicle that the nonprofit wants to maintain the educational program and also possibly develop a new art collection at the site. Museums are never superfluous.