SFMOMA, Part 3: The Flower Carrier

On the second floor of SFMOMA, on the same floor as Kahlo's double portrait, hangs a nearly square painting about four feet on each side. A man kneels on all fours under an enormous basket of flowers, bound to his back with a strap. He wears white cotton clothes and a straw hat, and his face is turned down toward the ground. Behind him a woman leans in to steady the load. Neither of them looks out at the viewer. The flowers spill over the rim of the basket in pink and purple, softened almost into abstraction.

This is Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier, painted in oil and tempera on Masonite in 1935. It is part of the Albert M. Bender Collection, given by Bender "in memory of Caroline Walter." SFMOMA owns it outright. It was among the first paintings to enter the collection of the new San Francisco Museum of Art.

The easy reading is folkloric: Mexico as color, flowers and straw hats. The Chicano artist Rupert Garcia, in SFMOMA's audio guide, calls the picture romanticized, and points to the light on the flowers and the hats. But the subject of the painting is weight. The flowers are a commodity, the man is the means of moving it, and the woman's help is what lets him rise. That subject, labor shown with dignity on a public scale, is what Rivera brought to San Francisco. Most of what he left there is not on canvas but on walls.

1920s: Walls in Mexico

The Mexican mural movement was a public art program that grew out of the Mexican Revolution. In the 1920s the post-revolutionary government commissioned artists to paint the walls of public buildings with Mexican history, Indigenous life and work. The aim was art that ordinary people would see without entering a museum. Rivera, along with José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, became one of its three leading figures.

In 1926 a group of Bay Area artists, among them the sculptor Ralph Stackpole and the painter Ray Boynton, went to Mexico City, saw his murals, and came home as advocates. Albert Bender used his connections to promote Rivera's work. Four years of effort and visa trouble later, Rivera arrived in San Francisco in November 1930.

1930–1931: Three Walls

In the months that followed, Rivera painted three frescoes in the Bay Area. A fresco is painted onto fresh, wet lime plaster, so that the pigment binds into the wall as it dries.

The first was Allegory of California, in the stairwell of the Pacific Stock Exchange's luncheon club, now the City Club of San Francisco. It was the first fresco Rivera painted in the United States. Its central figure, Calafia, the spirit of California, was modeled on the tennis champion Helen Wills. The commission put a Communist painter's portrait of the state's resources and workers inside the club of its stock exchange.

The second was a smaller fresco for the Atherton home of Sigmund and Rosalie Stern. The third, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931), covers a wall at the California School of Fine Arts on Chestnut Street. It shows workers building a city, and the artists and assistants building the fresco. Rivera painted himself into it, seated on the scaffold with his back to the viewer.

That third wall has had its own recent history. The school, later the San Francisco Art Institute, filed for bankruptcy in April 2023 with about $20 million in debt. In 2020, when the school was in default on a loan for which the mural was collateral, its board had considered selling the mural, reportedly to George Lucas for his museum in Los Angeles. The plan drew public protest and a move to landmark the mural. In March 2024 a nonprofit led by Laurene Powell Jobs bought the campus and the mural together for about $30 million. In 2025 the campus was renamed the California Academy of Studio Arts. The mural is now a designated landmark, and the new owners have said it will be restored and opened to the public.

1934: Coit Tower

The fastest results of Rivera's visit came from other painters. In 1934, under the federal Public Works of Art Project, twenty-six artists painted twenty-seven murals inside Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. San Francisco's Arts Commission describes the project as inspired by the Mexican government's mural program of the 1920s and intentionally reflecting Rivera's style. Several of the painters had studied or worked with him. Victor Arnautoff, who painted the panel of city life, had been Rivera's assistant in Mexico from 1929.

The project collided with politics while the paint was still wet. In February 1934 Rivera's mural at Rockefeller Center in New York was chipped off the wall, after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin from it. The Coit Tower artists protested. In San Francisco the dispute centered on a hammer and sickle painted into one panel, which was painted over. The murals were completed as the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike broke out on the docks below the hill. The finished walls carry pro-labor and socialist references throughout.

1935: The Flower Carrier

In March 1935, two months after the San Francisco Museum of Art opened, Bender wrote to Rivera in Mexico City asking for "a representation of your work at its finest and best." Rivera sent The Flower Carrier. In late August Bender mailed him a check for $500.

Rivera had painted flower vendors at least since Flower Day in 1925, and he returned to the subject often. Here the composition is pared down to the act of lifting: two figures, a basket and a strap. The man is not a portrait of any specific person. The painting stands for a class of work and the people who do it.

1936: Washington High

Arnautoff took the Rivera model into a public school. In 1936, under federal sponsorship, he completed Life of Washington, thirteen fresco panels at George Washington High School in San Francisco. Alongside the founder, the panels show enslaved people working at Mount Vernon and a dead Native American at the feet of settlers.

That choice drew protest early. The school's Black Student Union objected to it in 1968 and 1969. It became a target again eighty years after it was painted. In 2019 the San Francisco school board voted to paint over it, then voted instead to cover it. A state judge ruled that the district had violated California law by not conducting an environmental review first. In June 2022 a newly constituted board voted four to three to keep the murals on view. Supporters had argued that they are a critique of Washington. Many Black and Native students and community members said that the images of their ancestors were harmful to walk past every day. Both arguments rested on the same Rivera premise: a wall in a public building speaks to everyone who passes.

1940: Pan American Unity

Rivera returned to San Francisco in 1940 to paint at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. In a program called Art in Action, the public watched him work. Pan American Unity is a fresco twenty-two feet high and seventy-four feet long, on ten steel-framed panels weighing about thirty tons. It argues for a shared American art drawing on Indigenous and industrial traditions alike. Kahlo appears in it.

After the exposition the mural went to City College of San Francisco. It was stored for about twenty years, then installed in the college's Diego Rivera Theater in 1961. From June 2021 it was shown free of charge in SFMOMA's ground-floor Roberts Family Gallery, where more than half a million people saw it. The return move led to a cost dispute, settled in March 2024. The mural is now back at City College, in storage. It is meant to be installed in the college's planned Performing Arts and Education Center on the Ocean campus, where it will be visible from the street, Frida Kahlo Way.

1970s: The Mission

The lineage did not end with the New Deal. Emmy Lou Packard, who had worked as Rivera's assistant, corrected the brushwork of young Mission District muralists, including Michael Ríos, Jesús "Chuy" Campusano and Luis Cortázar, who painted Homage to Siqueiros inside a Mission District branch of Bank of America in 1973–74. The muralist Juana Alicia trained with Lucienne Bloch and Stephen Dimitroff, two more of Rivera's former assistants. Susan Cervantes of Precita Eyes Muralists has said, "We all have some links to Diego Rivera."

The Flower Carrier is the only part of this story SFMOMA can hang. The rest is on walls the museum does not own. 🌁

Timeline — Rivera in San Francisco

• 1926 — Bay Area artists visit Rivera in Mexico City; Albert Bender begins promoting him

• 1929 — Victor Arnautoff begins working as Rivera's assistant in Mexico

• 1930 — Rivera and Kahlo arrive in San Francisco in November

• 1931 — Allegory of California (Pacific Stock Exchange luncheon club); Stern house fresco, Atherton; The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (California School of Fine Arts)

• 1934 — Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural destroyed in February; Coit Tower murals painted, 26 artists, 27 murals

• 1935 — Bender requests a painting in March; The Flower Carrier enters the San Francisco Museum of Art

• 1936 — Arnautoff completes Life of Washington at George Washington High School

• 1940 — Rivera paints Pan American Unity at the Golden Gate International Exposition

• 1961 — Pan American Unity installed at City College of San Francisco

• 1973–74 — Homage to Siqueiros, Mission District Bank of America branch, with guidance from Emmy Lou Packard

• 2019 — San Francisco school board votes to cover the Arnautoff murals

• 2021 — Pan American Unity goes on view at SFMOMA in June

• 2022 — School board votes 4–3 in June to keep the Arnautoff murals on view

• 2023 — San Francisco Art Institute files for bankruptcy in April

• 2024 — Powell Jobs-led nonprofit buys the SFAI campus and Rivera mural in March; SFMOMA–City College settlement on Pan American Unity

• 2025 — SFAI campus reopens as the California Academy of Studio Arts