San Francisco Art Institute

The San Francisco Art Institute sits atop Russian Hill, anchored by a brutalist concrete tower that looms over the neighborhood with stark, vertical lines. Founded in eighteen seventy-one, the school served as a laboratory for the Bay Area Figurative Movement and helped launch artists like Mark Rothko and Kathryn Ann McCarty. In nineteen sixty-one, Diego Rivera painted a massive fresco, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, directly onto the wall of the campus gallery, leaving his own legs dangling over the scaffolding.