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Unlike some of his predecessors at the City College helm, Philip Day immediately appreciated the mural's real and potential value to the school -- and the extent to which others wanted to get their hands on it. Within two months of becoming chancellor in 1998, he received an unexpected invitation to have lunch with Harry Parker, director of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums, which include the de Young. Day had just arrived from being head of a college in Florida and had no idea who Parker was.
The lunch was arranged by Day's predecessor, Del Anderson, who -- perhaps portentously -- had been invited a short time earlier to join the de Young's board of directors. Parker wanted to acquire the mural for the new de Young, now under construction. "I just looked at Del and said, 'Look, you know the issue with that. If I offered my cooperation I would be the shortest-lived chancellor in the history of the college.'" Day says that "it was all very pleasant, but in less than five minutes there was nothing more to talk about."
It wasn't the first attempt by a museum to acquire the mural. In fact, it wasn't the de Young's first try. According to Robert Gabriner, the college's dean of research, planning, and grants, Parker and another de Young official put out a feeler in 1995, just as planning for the museum's new facility in Golden Gate Park was taking shape. (Parker did not respond to interview requests.) "They said they were interested in using [the mural] prominently near the entrance in some fashion," Gabriner recalls. "They really wanted it."
So did Peter Rodriguez, founder and former executive director of the Mexican Museum, whose overtures ruffled feathers at the college. Gabriner had an idea for promoting the mural after seeing an information kiosk at a museum in Italy while on vacation. With help from a multimedia company, his idea morphed into a portable reproduction of the mural that the college sends to educational conferences and school and civic events.
During the unveiling of the traveling exhibit at a reception hosted by the college in 1995, Rodriguez created a stir by criticizing CCSF's stewardship of the mural, saying it ought to be housed at the Mexican Museum. "It's a great work of art, and I wanted it where people are going to see it, and still do," says Rodriguez, 77, now retired.
Two members of the museum's board -- Guadalupe Rivera Marin, the artist's daughter, and John Pflueger, Timothy Pflueger's nephew -- have important ties to the mural. But the museum's current director, William Moreno, calls the ties "purely coincidental" and insists that "as much as we might have loved to have had it, the mural is pretty much off our radar screen now." (Rivera Marin, in fact, continues to be highly supportive of the college's own plans for the mural's future, Day and others say. Attempts to contact her for this article were unsuccessful.) Gabriner says that "after so many years of inattention, to suddenly have so much institutional interest was an eye-opener for us." Even a former Mexican consular officer in San Francisco got into the act, he says, briefly promoting an idea to house the mural at San Francisco International Airport.
It isn't difficult to see why the college's role in caring for the mural has come under fire. Even in the four decades since its rescue from the shed, the piece has been housed in a performing arts theater -- renamed the Diego Rivera Theater in 1993 -- that is a less-than-ideal venue for such a monumental work. Because of the lobby's shallow depth, it is impossible to glimpse the mural from afar. Instead, viewers are thrust against it, creating a viewing experience akin to sitting in the front row of a movie theater. Although the mural's 10 panels were intended to be viewed as a contiguous flat surface, to accommodate the limited space available when the lobby was designed, the panels rest against the wall in a distorted, slightly circular fashion.
But such considerations are quibbles compared to the mural's earlier handling: For years it was nearly impossible to see the work, even assuming one knew where to find it. "At one point I came within an inch of bringing up for censure the [theater arts instructor] who held the key [to the theater]," recalls Masha Zakheim, who taught English at the college from 1966 until 1991 and whose father, Bernard Zakheim, was among the muralists whose work is displayed at Coit Tower. "Talk about frustrating. We had this wonderful work of art on campus, and you couldn't get access to it."
Bergman, the librarian, recalls the time two European tourists came into the library asking for help finding the mural and her having to persuade campus police to open the door. "We get scholars, diplomats, you name it, from all over the world, who come here to see it," says Will Maynez, director of the college's physics lab, and another of the mural's fans. But they're the exception. Among the public, the mural remains obscure even on campus, which has no signs to direct visitors to it.
The college's rekindled interest in the mural can be traced to the late 1980s and a controversial plan to move it from the theater into a new college library, which opened in 1995. Although nothing like the library Timothy Pflueger once envisioned, the current library was designed with a soaring four-story atrium specifically to accommodate the mural.
