SFMOMA
San Francisco's landmark modern art museum, rebuilt bigger and bolder in 2016.
SFMOMA — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — is one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the United States. Founded in 1935, it was the first museum on the West Coast dedicated to 20th-century art. The current building, a dramatic expansion designed by Snøhetta that opened in 2016, more than doubled the exhibition space to around 170,000 square feet, making it a genuine destination in its own right. It sits in the South of Market neighborhood, just steps from Yerba Buena Gardens, and anchors what has become one of the city's main cultural corridors.
Inside, the collection spans painting, sculpture, photography, design, video, and media arts — roughly 33,000 works in total. You'll find major holdings of work by Richard Diebenkorn, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and a particularly strong photography collection that traces directly to the museum's early championing of the medium as a serious art form. The building itself rewards exploration: the undulating white façade with its textured surface references San Francisco Bay, and interior galleries spill across seven floors connected by soaring staircases and a dramatic atrium. The free-access ground floor includes works from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection — one of the most significant private collections of contemporary art in the world — which means you can walk in off the street and see world-class art without paying a cent.
Thursday evenings are the insider move: the museum stays open until 8pm and tends to be quieter than weekend afternoons. The café on the ground floor is run by In Situ, a concept by chef Corey Lee (of three-Michelin-star Benu) that reimagines dishes from celebrated chefs around the world — it's genuinely worth building a meal around, not just a pit stop.