San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

SFMOMA's deepest strength is photography: more than 17,800 works dating from 1839 to the present, anchored by the Prentice and Paul Sack Photographic Trust and shown in the dedicated Pritzker Center on Floor 3. Its second strength, the Fisher Collection, concentrates on American and European postwar and contemporary painting and sculpture, with unusually deep individual holdings of Calder, Kelly, Warhol and Bourgeois rather than a single example of each.

SFMOMA has stood at 151 Third Street since 18 January 1995, the sixtieth anniversary of its 1935 founding as the San Francisco Museum of Art. The building a visitor walks into today is really two buildings wearing one skin. Mario Botta's original block is a symmetrical brick and stone volume built around a cylindrical skylight, an oculus that drops light straight down onto the museum's central stair. In 2016 the Norwegian and New York firm Snohetta wrapped a second, much larger structure around and behind it, clad in rippled off-white fibreglass-reinforced polymer panels the architects said were meant to evoke the fog that sits over this part of the South of Market district most mornings. The oculus survived both buildings, and it is still the clearest way to tell which half of the museum a visitor is standing in.

The museum that became SFMOMA opened on 18 January 1935 on the fourth floor of the War Memorial Veterans Building on Van Ness Avenue, under its founding director Grace McCann Morley, and had no purpose-built home of its own for the first sixty years of its life. The San Francisco collector Albert M. Bender gave the new museum several hundred works in its opening year, including Diego Rivera's The Flower Carrier and Frida Kahlo's Frieda and Diego Rivera, and went on to donate more than 1,100 objects before his death in 1941; that gift still furnishes much of the painting collection on Floor 2. The museum recognised photography as a fine art in 1936, under curator John Humphrey, years before most American art museums did the same. The word Modern was added to the name only in 1975, the same year the painter Clyfford Still gave the museum twenty-eight of his own canvases. The Van Ness building closed to the public on 5 September 1994, and the new Botta-designed museum on Third Street opened four months later.

SFMOMA closed for three years from 2013 to build the Snohetta expansion, and reopened on 14 May 2016 with nearly three times its previous gallery space and about 45,000 square feet of free, art-filled public space that needs no ticket at all. The museum's own figures describe the new photography galleries on Floor 3 as the largest space permanently dedicated to the medium in any American art museum. Architecture critics were far less united than the museum's own press materials. Writing in the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright likened the new facade to a gigantic meringue; a New York Times report compared it to a cruise ship; and several critics singled out the decision to replace Botta's original granite staircase under the oculus with a new wooden one as the addition's single most contested move. Others, including critics at the Wall Street Journal and Architectural Record, judged the result a considered, workable marriage between a 1995 building and a 2016 one. Both readings are on the record, and neither has displaced the other.

The collection SFMOMA shows today comes from two very different sources, layered on top of each other. The founding-era gifts, from Bender's 1935 to 1941 donations through the Elise S. Haas bequest of 1991 that brought in Matisse's Femme au chapeau, and the Still gift of 1975, still furnish the Floor 2 galleries devoted to painting from 1900 onward. The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, promised to the museum in 2009 and installed across the new building's upper floors, is a different kind of holding altogether: about 1,100 postwar and contemporary works, assembled by the Gap's founders over four decades, that gave SFMOMA in a single gift more depth in Calder, Warhol, Kelly and their contemporaries than most museums acquire in a century. The two collections rarely share a room, so a visitor moving from Floor 2 to Floor 4 is really moving between two separate private collecting lives that happen to sit under the same roof.

SFMOMA's recent history includes two episodes that test how the institution talks about its own decisions. In 2019 the museum sold Rothko's Untitled, 1960, at Sotheby's for just over 50 million dollars, using the proceeds to buy work by ten artists, including Frank Bowling, Alma Thomas and Lygia Clark, and to endow a new acquisitions fund; the critic Lee Rosenbaum called the sale a trade of depth for breadth, and pointed out that the museum had asked Rothko himself to exchange the painting into its collection decades before deciding it was expendable. In May 2025 the museum laid off 29 staff, about eight percent of its workforce, days after the federal government withdrew funding from more than a dozen Bay Area arts organisations, including a 210,000 dollar accessibility grant to SFMOMA itself; the union representing most of the affected employees asked that the cuts come from the top of the organisation instead. Both episodes are part of the record a visitor is buying a ticket into, not a footnote to it.

SFMOMA is reviewed as one of the largest, most reliably well-stocked museums of modern and contemporary art on the West Coast, with the Fisher Collection giving it a depth in postwar American and European art that few American museums outside New York can match. The friction in the record is institutional rather than curatorial: a contested 2019 deaccession of a Rothko painting, a mixed critical verdict on the 2016 Snohetta building, and a 2025 round of staff layoffs during a wider funding squeeze on Bay Area arts institutions. Visitors on review platforms consistently praise the permanent collection, the free ground-floor spaces and the building's scale, while flagging the 30 dollar adult ticket, the Wednesday closure and, at times, the sheer size of the building as the main friction points of a visit.