San Francisco Art Institute, Diego Rivera Mural Sold

A new nonprofitformedby a group of wealthy philanthropists and arts patrons has purchased the historic San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) and the landmarked 1931 Diego Rivera mural contained within. Led by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the organization paid $30 million dollars for therecently bankruptedschool’s two-acre Russian Hill campus with the intention of reopening the institute, as first reported in theSan Francisco Chronicle.The nonprofit must first repair the building; that process is expected to take about four years to complete. The iconic mural,The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City,valuedat $50 million in the original bankruptcy filing, will remain in place and will be available for public viewing.

The purchase brings to a pleasing conclusion the unfortunate saga of SFAI, which opened in 1871 and over the ensuing 151 years counted variously among its faculty Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, and among its students photographer Annie Leibovitz and painter Kehinde Wiley. The school, which like so many others around the world, was forced by Covid-19 to temporarily shutter in 2020, struggled financially for the next two years before finally declaring bankruptcy andclosing permanentlyafter the University of San Francisco, which had been considering a merger with SFAI, deemed that plan too risky and decided to open its own art department instead. With the school closed, concern swirled around the fate of the Rivera mural, which depicts workers atop a wooden scaffold creating a fresco showing a city being built. A $200,000 Mellon Foundation grant for the work’s preservation hadarrivedweeks before the school’s closing, when officials were still considering selling it in order to keep the school’s doors open, but its fate had remained unclear until now.

San Francisco supervisor Aaron Peskin, who represents the municipal district that is home to SFAI’s campus, spearheaded the 2021 effort to landmark the mural and helped the nonprofit purchase the school by introducing an ordinance allowing a special use district specific to the premises and allowing an unaccredited institution to operate there. “I was bereaved, and I am now crying tears of joy that there will be an arts institution at 800 Chestnut Street,” Peskin told the Chronicle. “It is a dream come true.”