Museums
The Asian Art Museum
The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is a museum in San Francisco, California, United States.
It has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. Until recently housed at the de Young in Golden Gate Park, the Asian Art Museum re-opened on March 20, 2003 in the former San Francisco city library building opposite the San Francisco Civic Center, renovated for the purpose under the direction of Italian architect Gae Aulenti. The collection has approximately 17,000 works of art and artifacts from all major Asian countries and traditions, some of which are as much as 6,000 years old.
Major galleries are devoted to the arts of India, China, western Asia (including Persia), South-East Asia, Korea and Japan. There are 2,500 works on display in the permanent collection. The museum owes its origin to a donation to the city of San Francisco by Chicago millionaire Avery Brundage, who was a major collector of Asian art. The Society for Asian Art, incorporated in 1958, was the group that formed specifically to gain Avery Brundage's collection. The museum opened in 1966 as a wing of the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park.
Brundage continued to make donations to the museum, including the bequest of all his remaining personal art collection on his death in 1975. In total, Brundage donated more than 7,700 Asian art objects to San Francisco, i.e. just over half the museum's current collection.
In 1995, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Chong-Moon Lee made a $15 million donation to launch the funding campaign for a new building for the museum. The museum has become a focus for special and travelling exhibitions, including: the first major Chinese exhibition to travel outside China since the end of World War II (in 1975); an archaeological exhibition which attracted 800,000 visitors over an eight week period; an exhibition on Wisdom and Compassion opened by the Dalai Lama in 1991; and a display of the famous terra-cotta warriors of China's ancient city of Xi'an.
The Cable Car Museum
The Cable Car Museum is a museum in San Francisco, California. It contains historical and explanatory exhibits on the San Francisco cable car system, which can itself be regarded as a working museum. The museum is entered from an entrance at Washington and Mason.
The museum contains several examples of old cable cars, together with smaller exhibits and a shop. Perhaps of more interest are two overlook galleries which allow the visitor to overlook both the main power house, and also to descend below the junction of Washington and Mason streets in order to view the large cavern where the haulage cables are routed out to the street.
The California Academy of Sciences
The California Academy of Sciences is one of the ten largest natural history museums in the world, and one of the oldest in the United States of America.
It is located in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. The Steinhart Aquarium and the Morrison Planetarium are housed within its walls.
The Academy began life in 1853 as a learned society and still carries out a large amount of original research, with public exhibits and education becoming significant endeavours in the 20th century.
The Academy's main buildings in Golden Gate Park are closed for major refurbishment until 2008, though it has reopened in temporary accommodation at 875 Howard Street as of May 1, 2004.
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor (often abbreviated to simply "Legion of Honor" by locals) is a fine art museum in San Francisco, California. The name is used both for the museum collection and for the building in which it is housed.
The Legion of Honor was the gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of the sugar magnate and Thoroughbred racehorse owner/breeder Adolph B. Spreckels.
The building is a three-quarters scale imitation of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur in Paris. The design was based on a model of the Hôtel de Salm that appeared at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition, so it is not an exact copy.
It was given to the City of San Francisco by Alma de Bretteville Le Normand Spreckels and designed by George Applegarth and H. Guillaume.
The museum building occupies an elevated site in Lincoln Park in the northwest of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the surrounding Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the site of a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867. The cemetery was closed in 1908 and the bodies were relocated to Colma. During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s however, coffins and parts of skeletons were found. The plaza and fountain in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor is the western terminus of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. The terminus marker and an interpretive plaque are located in the southwest corner of the plaza and fountain, just to the left of the Palace.
The Cartoon Art Museum
The Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) is an art museum in San Francisco, California, specializing in the art of comics and cartoons.
It is the only museum in the western United States dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of all forms of cartoon art, and holds approximately six thousand pieces—including original animation cels, comic book pages, and early newspaper comic strips—in its permanent collection.
The museum was organized in 1984 by comic art enthusiasts. Its first incarnation had no fixed location, instead organizing showings at other local museums and corporate spaces. In 1987, with the help of an endowment from Charles Schulz, it established a home on the second floor of the San Francisco Call Bulletin Building at 814 Mission Street in the South of Market area.
In 2001 it moved to a ground floor location at 655 Mission Street which had been vacated by the Friends of Photography Ansel Adams Center. Besides its galleries, the museum also operates a research library, a classroom, and a museum bookstore.
It hosts seven major exhibitions per year, classes for children and adults, and lectures.
The Walt Disney Family Museum
The Walt Disney Family Museum is a future museum that is currently being built at the Presidio of San Francisco. When completed, the museum will house memorabilia and artifacts relating to the life and career of Walt Disney. The museum will be operated by The Walt Disney Family Foundation and is set to open in 2009. The Museum will be known as the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio. The museum will be located in one of the buildings at the presidio.
The Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is a public science museum, located in the Marina District at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, California.
It is one of San Francisco's most popular museums, drawing over 500,000 people each year. Founded in 1969 by the physicist Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium is dedicated to teaching science through hands-on exhibits.
Many of its exhibits are created by visual and performing artists as well as scientists and educators. Exhibit designs that have been created at the Exploratorium often are duplicated for other science museums worldwide.
Some exhibits, of course, can't be duplicated, such as the off-site Wave Organ, a unique sonic experience located on a nearby point of land jutting into San Francisco Bay.
The Exploratorium also features the Tactile Dome, a three-dimensional pitch-black labyrinth that visitors must navigate using the sense of touch.
The Exploratorium has an extensive website with many online science exhibits and experiments, which has received the Webby Award for Best Science Site five times since 1997.
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, comprising the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park is the largest public arts institution in the city of San Francisco and one of the largest art museums in California.
The Golden Gate Railroad Museum
The Golden Gate Railroad Museum is a non-profit heritage railway established in 1975 and dedicated to the preservation of steam and passenger railroad equipment, and the interpretation of local railroad history.
Previously located in San Francisco, California, the museum has 12 locomotives and over 25 pieces of rolling stock. Here is the notice on their website: “ If you are looking for our location to visit us, you will not find it.
Unfortunately we don't have a location that is open to the public today. We have been at Hunters Point Shipyard for fifteen years, but we lost our lease.
All of our collection has now been moved to Niles Canyon; you may be able to see some of this equipment by visiting the Pacific Locomotive Association in Sunol, California.
The M.H. de Young Museum
The M.H. de Young Museum (commonly called simply The de Young) is a fine arts museum located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. It is named for early San Francisco newspaperman M. H. de Young.
The museum originally opened in 1895 as an outgrowth of the California Midwinter International Exposition of 1894 (a fair modeled on the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of the previous year).
The building was originally decorated with cast-concrete ornaments on the façade.
The ornaments were removed in 1949 as they began to fall and had become a hazard. The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake severely damaged the building. View of the California Academy of Sciences under construction from the observation tower of the de Young View of the California Academy of Sciences under construction from the observation tower of the de Young Architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron and engineers Arup designed the newly rebuilt structure, which reopened on October 15, 2005.
Copper plating, which will change colors through exposure to the elements, surrounds the present building. A 144 ft. (44 m) observation tower allows visitors to see much of Golden Gate Park's Music Concourse (See Below) and rises above the Park's treetops for a new view of the Golden Gate and Marin headlands.
As part of the agreement that created the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 1972, the de Young's collection of European art was sent to the Legion of Honor. In compensation, the de Young received the right to display the bulk of the organization's anthropological holdings. These include significant pre-Hispanic works from Teotihuacan and Peru, as well as indigenous tribal art from sub-Saharan Africa.
The El Museo Mexicano or The Mexican Museum
The El Museo Mexicano or The Mexican Museum is a San Francisco, California, USA museum created to exhibit the aesthetic expression of the Latino, Chicano, Mexican, and Mexican-American people.
The Mexican Museum was founded in 1975 by artist Peter Rodríguez.
Its mission was "to exhibit the aesthetic expression of the Mexican and Mexican-American people."
This mission was expanded to reflect Mexican, Chicano, and Latino artistic experience. The Museum was originally located in San Francisco's Mission District. In 2001, the Museum was relocated to the Fort Mason Center, Building D, Marina Boulevard and Buchanan Street, San Francisco.
A capital campaign is underway to relocated the Museum to a permanent location in the Mission District at Mission and 3rd. Today, the Museum's collection comprises over 12,000 objects.
The Museum of the African Diaspora
The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) is a new museum in San Francisco, California, USA, dedicated to the diasporan histories of people of African origin and their influence and adaptation throughout the world.
Focusing on experience in North America, the Caribbean and South America, the museum's exhibits trace the history and legacy of the slave trade, fights for freedom in the African continent and the New World, music of African influence or origin, and contemporary multicultural and multi-ethnic societies.
It is located inside St. Regis's new 42-storey St. Regis Museum Tower next to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The museum opened in 2005 along with the condo and hotel tower.MoAD introduces visitors to the original African Diaspora, the original movement of Homo Sapiens from the first human remain findings in Ethiopia, to gradually across the globe.
The museum suggestively asks it visitors "when did you first realise you were African?" From a Pan-Ethnic perspective, the museum's main emphasis is that all humans, regardless of race, are equal and should be treated equally. We are by all means, all from the original human family.
The Museum of the City of San Francisco
The Museum of the City of San Francisco operated by the San Francisco Historical Society currently has exhibits at Pier 45 and San Francisco City Hall. The Old Mint will be renovated to become the permanent home of the museum.
The Musée Mécanique
The Musée Mécanique is a collection of penny arcade games and related artifacts located in San Francisco, California.
The museum contains one of the world's largest privately owned collections of mechanically operated musical instruments and antique arcade machines. Many exhibits are over 100 years old.
It is presently located at Pier 45 in the Fisherman's Wharf tourist area, but prior to 2002, was previously housed in the lower level of the Cliff House restaurant at Ocean Beach. For a time in between, the entire collection was in storage without the possibility of public viewing.
Several well-known attractions include Laffing Sal (who greets visitors as they enter), "Susie the Can-Can Dancer", and the fascinating "Carnival".
The collection was created by Edward Galland Zelinsky, whose family maintains the collection. The museum also includes a small video game arcade with games of more recent vintage.
The Randall Museum
The Randall Museum is a museum in San Francisco, California and is owned and operated by the City's Recreation and Parks Department. It focuses on the arts, crafts, sciences, and natural history. On view are a number of live native and domestic animals and interactive displays.
The Museum is located in Corona Heights Park on a large hill between the Castro and Haight districts of San Francisco, and boasts stunning views of the city, downtown financial district and the bay.
The museum charges no admission and offers events, movies, plays, lectures, exhibits, and classes for ages 3–adult, but is geared mostly toward children and educational field trips.
Originally named the "Junior Museum", the facility was established in 1937 in an old city jail.
In 1947, a $12 million bond was issued for the creation of recreation and park capital projects, one of which included a new museum.
In 1951, what is now the Randall Museum opened at its current location with exhibits, a theater, classrooms, arts and crafts shops and studios, a live animal room and gardens overlooking the San Francisco Bay.
The Randall Museum takes its name from Josephine D. Randall, a zoologist who organized one of the first Girl Scout troops in the United States as well as one of the first Camp Fire Girl troops.
She later went on to become the first Superintendent of Recreation for San Francisco, creating the museum and bringing national recognition to the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department for its outstanding services. 199 Museum Way, San Francisco, CA 94114
The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park
The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park is located in San Francisco, California, USA. The park includes a fleet of historic vessels, a visitor center, a maritime museum, and a library/research facility.
The park is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the San Francisco Maritime Museum -- a name that dates from 1951, but changed when the collections were acquired by the National Park Service, in 1978.
Today's San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park was authorized in 1988; the maritime museum is among the park's many cultural resources. The park also incorporates the Aquatic Park Historic District, bounded by Van Ness Avenue, Polk Street, and Hyde Street.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a major modern art museum and San Francisco landmark. It opened in 1935 under founding director Dr. Grace Morley (Grace L. McCann Morley, Director from 1935–1958) as the San Francisco Museum of Art, the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. For its first sixty years, the museum occupied upper floors of the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Civic Center.
Under director Henry T. Hopkins (1974–1986) the museum added "Modern" to its title in 1975, and established an international reputation. In a major transformation and expansion, in 1995 the museum moved to its current location, 151 Third Street, adjacent to Yerba Buena Gardens in the SOMA district and its iconic architectural showpiece facility designed by Mario Botta.
Inviting comparison to the preeminent MOMA in New York City, the museum re-branded itself "SFMOMA".
The museum has in its collection important works by Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp and Ansel Adams, among others.
The famous cinema series Art in Cinema was started at SFMOMA in 1946 by filmmaker Frank Stauffacher. The St. Regis Museum Tower, W Hotel San Francisco and the PacBell Building rise right next to the museum.
The San Francisco Railway Museum
The San Francisco Railway Museum is a local railway history museum located in the South of Market area of San Francisco.
This small museum features exhibits on the antique streetcars of the F Market & Wharves and national landmark cable cars that continue to run along the city's major arteries.
The museum is located at the Steuart Street F line stop, catty-corner from the Ferry Building. Admission to the museum is free.
In addition to the permanent collection of San Francisco railway artifacts from Market Street Railway Company and San Francisco Municipal Railway, the museum produces unique exhibits such as a retrospective on the 1906 Earthquake and a replicated end of the now extinct MSR '100-Class streetcar'.
The museum is a project of the nonprofit Market Street Railway, Muni’s historic transportation advocacy group.
The San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center (SFWMPAC)
The San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center (SFWMPAC) is located in San Francisco, California and is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States.
It covers three hectares (7.5 acres) in San Francisco's Civic Center Historic District with 7,500 seats in its several venues. Opera, symphony, modern and classical dance, theatre, recitals, plays, lectures, meetings, receptions, special screenings and gala events all have a place at the Center.
The origins of the Center lie in the development of the War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building which began after the First World War, and culminated in the construction of two buildings, the Opera House and a multi-purpose building next door, the Veterans’ Building, both of which opened in 1932.
The latter housed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1932 to 1994. The SFWMPAC has great historical significance as well. The United Nations Charter of 1945 was signed in the Veterans Auditorium (now Herbst Theatre) and in 1951, the Japanese Peace Treaty was signed in the Opera House.
The Center has been host to U.S. presidents and foreign heads of state. The building appears on the first United Nations commemorative postage stamp, the 1952 5 cent issue, "Birthplace of the Charter." The Arts Center was chosen in 1990 to host the first Goldman Environmental Prize Ceremony, which is now presented annually at the Center.
The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is a contemporary art center in San Francisco, California, United States and part of the California College of the Arts. It was established in 1998 and serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of international contemporary art and curatorial practise.
It is regarded as one of the leading art institutions in the United States.
Over the last decade the Wattis Institute has become one of the premiere venues for contemporary art exhibitions worldwide with a history of some of the most groundbreaking exhibitions organized in the United States.
The local impact is equally important and the Wattis Institute is central to the vitality of the Bay Area art scene. Local residents and visitors come to the Wattis Institute to see the best work of emerging, as well as new work by established artists, and can attend any program free of charge.
The Wattis Institute also runs the pioneering Capp Street Project, founded in San Francisco in 1983, the first visual arts residency in the United States dedicated solely to the creation and presentation of new art installations. Since its inception, Capp Street Project has given more than 100 local, national, and international artists the opportunity to create new work through its residency and public exhibition programs.
Lawrence Rinder was the founding director. The current director of the Wattis Institute is Jens Hoffmann who replaced Ralph Rugoff in 2006. The Wattis Institute is located on the San Francisco campus of the California College of the Arts at the bottom of Potrero Hill in a refurbished 160,000 square foot former Greyhound Bus maintenance facility designed in 1951. The Wattis Institute is named after Phyllis C.
Wattis one of San Francisco's greatest supporters of the arts who passed away in June 2002 at the age of 97. During her lifetime, she supported many art organizations in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
She served on the board of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera and was as much an ideological as financial supporter of these organizations.
Her vision helped to shape the art community of San Francisco to be one of the most active and most cutting edge.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA)
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is a contemporary arts center in San Francisco, California. Located in Yerba Buena Gardens, YBCA features visual art, performance, and film/video that celebrates local, national, and international artists and the Bay Area's diverse communities.
YBCA programs year-round in two landmark buildings—the Galleries and Forum by Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki and Theater by American architect James Stewart Polshek.
Zeum
Zeum is an interactive children's art and technology museum located at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, California. It aims to "foster creativity in young people of all ages, backgrounds and learning styles by providing a hands-on environment for self-expression". It is mostly known for its exhibits which allow children to create their own media using modern technologies. Zeum began as a San Francisco city project in 1992 and opened to the public on October 31, 1998.