San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum and nonprofit organization located in San Francisco, California. SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art, and has built an internationally recognized collection with over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art. In 2024, SFMOMA was ranked 14th in The Washington Post's list of the best art museums in the U.S. The museum was founded in 1935 with galleries in the Veterans Building in Civic Center. In 1995, the museum opened in its Mario Botta-designed home in the SoMa district. On May 14, 2016, following a three-year-long closure for a major expansion project by Snøhetta architects, the museum re-opened to the public with more than double the gallery space and almost six times as much public space as the previous building, allowing SFMOMA to showcase an expanding collection along with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art.

History

SFMOMA was founded in 1935 under director Grace L. McCann Morley as the San Francisco Museum of Art. For its first sixty years, the museum rented the fourth floor of the Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue in the Civic Center. A gift of 36 artworks from Albert M. Bender, including The Flower Carrier (1935) by Diego Rivera, established the basis of the permanent collection. Bender donated more than 1,100 objects to SFMOMA during his lifetime and endowed the museum's first purchase fund. The museum began its second year with an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse. Also in 1936, the museum established its photography collection, becoming one of the first museums to recognize photography as an art form. In 1940, the museum held its first architecture exhibition, Telesis: Space for Living.

The museum was obliged to move to a temporary facility on Post Street in March 1945 to make way for the United Nations Conference on International Organization; following the signing of the United Nations Charter at Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building, the museum returned to its original location in July. Later that year, the museum presented Jackson Pollock's first solo museum exhibition. Founding director Grace Morley held film screenings at the museum beginning in 1937, and in 1946 brought in filmmaker Frank Stauffacher to found the Art in Cinema film series, which ran for nine years. The museum continued its expansion into new media with the 1951 launch of a biweekly television program, Art in Your Life, later renamed Discovery, which ran for three years. Morley ended her 23-year tenure as museum director in 1958 and was succeeded by George D. Culler (1958–65) and Gerald Nordland (1966–72). In 1967, SFMOMA inaugurated the biennial SECA Art Award to honor San Francisco Bay Area artists. The museum rose to international prominence under director Henry T. Hopkins (1974–86), adding "Modern" to its name in 1975.

In the 1980s, under Hopkins and his successor John R. Lane (1987–1997), SFMOMA established three new curatorial posts: curator of painting and sculpture, curator of architecture and design, and curator of media arts. The positions of director of education and director of photography were elevated to full curatorial roles. At this time SFMOMA took on an active special exhibitions program, both organizing and hosting traveling exhibitions, including major presentations of the work of Jeff Koons, Sigmar Polke, and Willem de Kooning. In 1992, Harry W. "Hunk" Anderson and Mary Margaret "Moo" Anderson "transformed SFMOMA's collection of American Pop art in one fell swoop," building on prior gifts of works by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns with additional works dating from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, including paintings by Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Robert Indiana, as well as a wall relief by Claes Oldenburg. In January 1995 the museum opened its current location at 151 Third Street, adjacent to Yerba Buena Gardens in the SOMA district. Mario Botta, a Swiss architect from Canton Ticino, designed the new US$60 million facility. SFMOMA made a number of important acquisitions under the direction of David A. Ross (1998–2001), who had been recruited from the Whitney Museum in New York, including works by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, René Magritte, and Piet Mondrian, as well as Marcel Duchamp's iconic Fountain (1917/1964). Those and acquisitions of works by Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Chuck Close and Frank Stella put the institution in the top ranks of American museums of modern art. After three years and $140 million building up the collection, Ross resigned when a slow economy forced the museum to keep a tighter rein on its resources.

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