SFMOMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, faces you as the first museum on the West Coast dedicated exclusively to twentieth-century and contemporary art, and one of the largest museums of modern art in the world. SFMOMA was founded in 1935 as the San Francisco Museum of Art, a municipal institution that reflected the city's long engagement with the visual arts. The museum moved to its current SoMa location in a building designed by Mario Botta in 1995, with its distinctive black and white striped granite exterior and the circular skylight that floods the atrium with natural light.
In 2016, a massive expansion designed by the Norwegian firm Snøhetta added 235,000 square feet, more than doubling the museum's size. The expansion was largely funded by gifts from the collection of Donald and Doris Fisher — founders of Gap Inc. — who donated more than a thousand works of art. The collection is particularly strong in Abstract Expressionism, photography, and contemporary California art.
Richard Serra's monumental steel sculpture Sequence fills an entire room of the museum; walking through its curved steel walls is one of the most singular physical experiences in any museum in the country. The museum's rooftop terraces offer views of the downtown skyline and access to a garden designed with the same care as the interior galleries.