Will sale of San Francisco Art Institute include Diego Rivera mural?

Trustees for the bankrupt San Francisco Art Institute have listed its nearly 2-acre Russian Hill campus for sale, but it may or may not include a Diego Rivera mural that could be worth more than the buildings themselves.

Rivera’s fresco — ”Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City” — is valued at $50 million while a recent estimate of the value of the campus SFAI occupied for nearly a century at 800 Chestnut Street is $40 million, according to the San Francisco Business Times. 

Cushman & Wakefield is listing the two-building 93,000-square-foot campus with no advertised price. A Cushman rep told the Business Times that Rivera’s 1931 40-foot-by-30-foot work “is available for acquisition along with the real estate.” 

But Gregg Kleiner, an attorney for the trustee of the bankrupt estate, said the estate is also exploring a sale of the mural alone, despite city leaders’ attempts to keep it on the campus by initiating landmarking procedures for it in 2021. The overall campus has been landmarked since the 1970s, according to district Supervisor Aaron Peskin.

“While not impossible, it makes it very difficult if a new owner had plans to alter the buildings,” Peskin told the Business Times. “It’s not that you can’t do anything — there have been plenty of buildings that have landmark designations that have gone before the Historic Preservation Commission and have been altered, but a wholesale demolition is unlikely.”

The land and original 1926 structure with a bell tower and a courtyard is owned by the Regents University of California. There is also a 1968 addition with a rooftop amphitheater. The UC has agreed to split the net sales proceeds with the bankrupt estate, according to the Cushman rep.

The San Francisco Art Institute has an over 150-year history and at its height had about 700 students. But enrollment has dropped significantly in recent years and by the time it closed its main campus last year it had just 41 students. Last summer, the University of San Francisco backed out of a planned acquisition deal citing “business risks” but went ahead with an expansion near its campus in Anza Vista that winter.

Bay Area campuses have been hitting the market with increased frequency of late. Golden Gate University put its downtown SF campus on the market last fall and sold a portion of it, a nearly 50,000-square-foot building at 40 Jessie Street, for $17.6 million to Long Market Property Partners in May. Just this month, BH Properties bought the 57-acre campus of Holy Names University in Oakland after the Catholic school defaulted on a $49 million loan. 

—Emily Landes 

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