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How Do You Move a 30-Ton Diego Rivera Fresco? Very Carefully.

Diego Rivera’s rarely seen “Pan American Unity,” which celebrates the Americas, has been carefully extracted from its home at City College and moved to SFMOMA.

“Pan American Unity,” a 30-ton, 74-foot-wide-by-22-foot mural by Diego Rivera, being installed at SFMOMA as the culmination of a four-year, multimillion-dollar undertaking involving engineers, architects, art historians, art handlers and riggers from the United States and Mexico. It will be on view starting Monday.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO — For decades the monumental 10-panel fresco by Diego Rivera depicting a continent linked by creativity has been mounted in the lobby of a theater at City College of San Francisco. There, somewhat tucked away from the art world, it has been cared for as a labor of love by a de facto guardian who has long dreamed of finding a way to allow more people to experience it.

Now, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar undertaking involving mechanical engineers, architects, art historians, fresco experts, art handlers and riggers from the United States and Mexico, the 30-ton, 74-foot-wide-by-22-foot mural has been carefully extracted and moved across town to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will go on display on June 28.

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Rivera painted the fresco at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, as thousands of people looked on. Paco Link, the museum’s project manager for the fresco, likened the work to “a 70-foot eggshell.”Credit...Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York, via City College of San Francisco

“Diego was building a metaphoric bridge between the Mexican culture and the tech culture of the United States,” said Will Maynez, the former lab manager of the physics department at City College, who became the unlikely guardian of the work, which is owned by the College.

Maynez, who is Mexican American, speaks fluent Rivera and has spent 25 years researching and promoting the fresco, “Pan American Unity.” Its panels are a kaleidoscope of Rivera’s thoughts: the looming goddess of earth, Coatlicue; Mexican artisans; American industrialists; historical leaders of both nations; dictators; Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, and himself. Its full title is “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent.”

Moving the fresco to SFMOMA was a mammoth undertaking.

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Esteban Granados, head rigger for Atthowe Fine Art Services, installing the mural at SFMOMA.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
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Roberto Martinez, a rigger, at the site of the extraction, at the theater at City College of San Francisco.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
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Each part of the process was thought out in advance to move the panels to the museum. One early trip involved a special truck holding one panel encased with custom-made shock absorbers riding at 5 miles per hour across town.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times

“This is one of the most ambitious things this museum has ever done — to move something this large, this fragile and this important,” said Neal Benezra, the director of the museum. Paco Link, the project manager for the fresco, likened the fresco to “a 70-foot eggshell.” (The work will be exhibited in a free gallery on the first floor of the museum as it prepares for its “Diego Rivera’s America” exhibition, which opens next year; the mural will remain on view at the museum until sometime in 2023 and will then be returned to the college. A new performing arts center, funded by a voter-approved bond measure, will house the fresco. It is not clear when the new building will be ready, though.)

It is not the first time the giant fresco has been moved.

Thousands of people watched Rivera paint it at the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Plans to expand the mural and make it the centerpiece of a library at the college were derailed by World War II. For years, it was stashed in a shed at the college. In 1961 it was moved to the campus theater building, now called Diego Rivera Theater (at 50 Frida Kahlo Way), where it was wedged into too small a space.

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A time lapse of the installation of “Pan American Unity” in the Roberts Family Gallery at SFMOMA.CreditCredit...Video by Don Ross/sfmoma

Each month, about 100 art students and Rivera tourists might have seen it at the college, Maynez estimated. He has formed a symbiotic relationship with the mural. Years ago, when his wife became ill with Alzheimer’s, the fresco work sustained him. And when she died in May 2020, he said, “It saved my life.”

Maynez, 74, is self-taught. Traveling around the world, he (along with Julia Bergman, a college librarian who died in 2017) unearthed letters, diaries, oral histories and even some of Rivera’s notes for his autobiography, “My Art, My Life.” Maynez translated some of Rivera’s writings, built a robust website with a blog and has worked on preserving the mural’s legacy with 3-D pictures online.

He can tell you why Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph, and Robert Fulton, who engineered the steamboat, are in the foreground of part of the mural: Because both men also were painters, Maynez said, “They set the theme of reconciliation of art and science.”

Take a step back, and the arc of people across the fresco stands out. Notice that it resembles the arc of the Golden Gate Bridge, he said. And the mother hovering over a dead child? That’s Rivera paying homage to “Guernica,” painted by his friend Picasso.

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Diego Rivera and an assistant working on “Pan American Unity” at Treasure Island, 1940.Credit...San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
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The mural, at City College before it was moved to SFMOMA. It had been in the campus’s theater building since 1961.Credit...Barry Chin

Nearly every weekday since he retired nine years ago, Maynez walks or takes public transit to City College to care for the fresco. When he received honorariums for talks, he donated the money to the mural’s restoration; he has not been paid by City College for his work with the mural.

“Whenever someone has a question, they’ll say, ‘Oh, Will will know that,’” said Michelle Barger, head of conservation at SFMOMA. “He’s the keeper of all things ‘Pan American Unity,’” she added.

Benezra, SFMOMA’s director, said that he saw the work as “Rivera’s painterly plea for a kind of unity of the Americas.”

“We’re living in a time of tremendous resurgent nationalism around the world,” he continued, “and this is an anti-nationalist way of looking at things.”

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“Diego was building a metaphoric bridge between the Mexican culture and the tech culture of the United States,” said Will Maynez, the de facto guardian of the fresco, whose mission has been for people to see the work. He has spent 25 years researching and promoting it.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times

In 2011, wanting more people to see the mural and hoping he could find a better campus location, Maynez, with approval from administrators, used funds from a Rivera account at the college’s foundation to pay for a study on the feasibility of moving the mural. When the answer came back that it would cost a huge amount of money and be close to impossible, Maynez took that as a yes.

At a meeting at the museum once it was involved in the project, Maynez recalls that Benezra had told him: “‘The mural will never be little-known again.’”

In an interview, Maynez said, “This is all I’ve ever wanted.”

The museum took the thorough route: It engaged engineers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s multidisciplinary design center, which has been known to tackle the near-impossible.

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CreditCredit...Video by Cayce Clifford

Alejandro Ramirez Reivich, a professor of engineering design at the university who led the investigation into how the murals could be safely moved, described the project as “an opportunity to try to bring these two countries together.”

Dr. Reivich said he had been fascinated by Rivera’s art since he was a child, and his American-born artist mother took him to Rivera’s studio.

Rivera, who intended for the fresco to be moved to City College, did not paint directly onto a wall, buton plaster with steel frames. But when the panels were put into the theater building, studs attached to the back of them were embedded into the concrete wall with no apparent thought that they would be moved again.

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Rivera, holding plans for the mural to be painted in the 1940 Golden Gate International Exposition. Its full title is “The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on This Continent.”Credit...San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

Two summers ago, as engineers were investigating the mural, they drilled 18-inch-wide Swiss-cheese-like holes in the college theater’s exterior walls. Wearing a bicycle helmet, Dr. Reivich climbed in to see how the panels were attached. “He was like the mad scientist,” Barger said.

Knowing that the biggest threat to the fresco would be vibrations, Dr. Reivich’s team tested mock-ups. Three university artists painted nearly exact replicas of two panels, using the same type of lime and paintbrushes as Rivera. Dr. Reivich’s students built a wall like the one at City College, placing bolts and welding in the same locations. They experimented with tools to determine how to extract the panels with minimal vibrations. Then they shook, bent and hammered them, Dr. Reivich said, to learn the maximum resistance they could support.

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Before the recent move of the mural, SFMOMA hired engineers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s multidisciplinary design center to help figure out how to execute it safely.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times
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The mural, which is going to be exhibited in a free gallery on the first floor of the museum. It will remain on view until sometime in 2023 and will then be returned to the college. Credit...Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico D.F./Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York; City College of San Francisco and SFMOMA; Don Ross

This spring, movers began the task of extricating the panels from the concrete wall. Threaded rods were slowly twisted into place above and below the mural by teams of movers situated inside and outside the building, who wore headsets to synchronize their actions as they simultaneously turned the rods — one-sixteenth of an inch at a time. It took two hours for one panel to move six inches.

Then, before dawn one Sunday last month, a truck holding a panel encased with custom-made shock absorbers rode at 5 miles per hour across town and delivered it to the museum, where it was hoisted into place. (This was the first of seven trips.)

Maynez was there when it arrived. “It’s one of the best days of my life,” he said.

A correction was made on 
June 22, 2021

An earlier version of this article misidentified the manager of the fresco's moving for the museum. Paco Link was the project manager for SFMOMA for this Diego Rivera fresco, not for all of the museum's frescoes. An earlier version of this article also incorrectly described the part of Rivera's mural paying homage to Picasso's "Guernica." It was an image of a dead child, not a distraught one. The article also misstated the number of panels moved on a truck one day in May. It was one panel, not two. That error was repeated in a picture caption. 

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Fresco’s Relocation Is Handled With Care. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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