Allegory of California by Diego Rivera

I was in San Franscisco recently, and was attending a reception at the City Club, which is located in the Stock Exhange building on Sansome. It is a gorgeous Art Deco building with all sort of wonderful decorative details of the era. But the most specatcular--and for me unexpected--thing of all was this fantastic mural by Diego Rivera. He is my favorite muralists and one of the painters who I almost always enjoy his work.

How did this mural come to be there? In it's first life, the room was the lunch room for the Pacific Stock Exchange, which seems an unlikely place for an avowed communist to leave his mark on the United States, but everyone has to earn a living, and in the late 1920's Mexico was not a hospitable place for working artists. Ralph Stackpole, a sculptor, was in charge of the artistry for the Stock Exchange building. Stackpole had become acquainted with Rivera in Paris, and the friendship deepened in 1926 when Stackpole visited Mexico. He greatly admired Rivera's work at the Ministry of Education and at Chapingo, and had bought some of his paintings and taken them home. In 1931, Rivera completed this painting, depicting Califia, and all the bounty of California. Calafia is a fictional warrior queen who ruled over a kingdom of Black women living on the mythical Island of California. The character of Queen Calafia was created by Spanish writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo who first introduced her in his popular novel entitled Las sergas de Esplandián (The Adventures of Esplandián), written around 1500. Califia has been depicted as the Spirit of California, and has been the subject of modern-day sculpture, paintings, stories and films; she often figures in the myth of California's origin, symbolizing an untamed and bountiful land prior to European settlement. Something about that appealed to Rivera, and this is the mural to prove it.