World class Mexican museum coming to SF

San Francisco is getting another cultural treasure – a world-class museum to showcase the largest collection of Mexican and Latino art in the nation.

Groundbreaking is set for Tuesday for the new Mexican Museum – the realization of a dream by Mexican-American artist Peter Rodriguez, who opened the city’s first museum for Latino art in a Mission District storefront in 1975.

Rodriguez founded the original Mexican Museum and started a collection that now has more than 16,000 pre-Columbian, colonial and contemporary works of Mexican and Latino art.

The new 60,000 square foot museum in downtown San Francisco will be home to works of art that include 800 pieces of Mexican folk art donated by the family of Nelson Rockefeller and pieces by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and painter Miguel Covarrubias.

The new museum is set to open in the spring of 2019.

Copyright 2016 The Associated Press