For more than 80 years, Diego Rivera’s monumental fresco “Pan American Unity” has never had a permanent home in San Francisco worthy of its scale and artistic significance. The turning point for the masterpiece comes this week at City College of San Francisco.
Will Maynez, a retired City College lab manager who has been the mural’s self-appointed guardian for 25 years, came to campus Tuesday just to look through a gap in a construction fence and watch an excavator grade a vacant lot. Behind that fence will rise the Diego Rivera Performing Arts Center, and the lot was being smoothed for the ceremonial groundbreaking Thursday afternoon.
For Maynez, 78, the ceremony celebrates more than the new building: It signals the fulfillment of a vision for “Pan American Unity,” 74 feet wide and 22 feet tall, which arrived on campus in 1942 and will finally be properly showcased and lighted in the lobby of the new theater…