In 1940, while Europe was at war and America debated its own entry into the conflict, Diego Rivera stood on a scaffold on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay and painted. The mural was Pan American Unity, a 22-by-74-foot work created for the Art in Action exhibition at the Golden Gate International Exposition. Rivera painted in public, before live audiences, transforming the act of creation into performance. It would be his last major mural in the United States, and he poured into it everything he believed about the relationship between North and South America.
The Golden Gate International Exposition ran on Treasure Island in 1939 and 1940. Rivera was invited to participate in the Art in Action exhibition, where artists worked in public to demonstrate their creative processes. He chose to paint a mural exploring the marriage of artistic expression from Mexico and the creative genius of American industry. The mural's ten panels depict pre-Columbian sculpture, modern machinery, Frida Kahlo, Charlie Chaplin, and the assembly of an automobile, weaving together the cultural histories of the Americas into a single visual argument for unity. Rivera worked with assistants and before audiences who watched each brushstroke.
After the exposition closed, the mural was stored and eventually displayed at San Francisco City College, where it remained for decades. In 2021, the mural was moved to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for a major exhibition that brought it renewed attention. The relocation was an enormous logistical challenge, requiring the careful transport of ten massive fresco panels. The exhibition attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and reignited interest in Rivera's vision of pan-American solidarity. The mural's journey mirrors the shifting fortunes of public art: created for a temporary fair, stored for years, rediscovered, and celebrated anew.
Pan American Unity is one of several Rivera murals in San Francisco, alongside the Allegory of California at the Pacific Stock Exchange and the Making of a Fresco at the San Francisco Art Institute. Together they represent the most significant body of Rivera's work outside of Mexico. The Pan American Unity mural is particularly notable for its optimism, its belief that the industrial power of the north and the artistic traditions of the south could strengthen each other. Rivera painted it as fascism was consuming Europe. The mural's message of hemispheric cooperation was both timely and, in retrospect, poignantly idealistic.
The mural was painted at Treasure Island (37.82°N, 122.37°W) and is now associated with San Francisco City College (37.72°N, 122.45°W) and SFMOMA (37.79°N, 122.40°W). Treasure Island is visible in San Francisco Bay. Nearest airports: SFO (KSFO, 11 nm south), Oakland (KOAK, 6 nm east).