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The 'Temporary' Mural
6 October 2025
Two years ago, a mural-making workshop organized by the City College art department professors and funded by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art produced a four-paneled grayscale piece depicting Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and mural installation workers.
The Temporary Mural. Nikon D200 with 18-200mm Nikkor and circular polarizer at 32mm (48mm equivalent), f8, 1/125 seconds and ISO 200. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
It was done in black-and-white, art professor Nancy Mizuno Elliott explained, because the eight-hour workshop was not about painting a picture but about the process of creating a mural, enlarging an image with a grid. Two to four students worked on each panel.
"The paintings were composed of images based off of photos of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo while in San Francisco, as well as photos of workers installing the Pan American Unity mural," Imani C. Davis wrote in her 2023 story about the mural project in the campus newspaper The Guardian.
There was just one not-so-little problem. As one of the students asked Elliott, "Are you gonna put this somewhere permanent or is this more temporary?"
Elliott told Davis, "And I said, you know, we really don't have a space for this, so we'll just call it temporary. We'll just call it an experience."
That struck a nerve with us.
Take a look at your photo collection, whether it's on your phone or a hard drive. There really isn't a space to view all of those images created in the digital age.
There's a place to store them, but viewing them is a problem. And not a little one.
But, as Elliott put it, those images represent "an experience." And a geezer like your editor can, after creating tens of thousands of images (don't ask), confidently describe that experience as "a life."
It is no fallacy that, apart from some ill-advised selfies, that collection is likely composed primarily of images of other people in your life. Because it is those other people you lived among as friends and family. In no small way, they defined your life in ways a resume cannot.
Just as one pixel does not a picture make, you might say. It takes a collection of them.
You wouldn't see this image of the mural project if it hadn't found a home, even if the current home seems temporary, too. But we're all temporary, after all, so we were just glad to see the mural still around, it's back to the sun, celebrating the human experience.