San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

SFMOMA opened in 1935 as the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to modern and contemporary art, originally occupying space in the Veterans Building at Civic Center. It moved into its own building in the SoMa district in 1995, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta with a distinctive black-and-white striped cylindrical skylight rising above the entrance.

A major expansion designed by Norwegian firm Snøhetta reopened in 2016, more than doubling the museum's gallery space and nearly sextupling its publicly accessible area. The collection includes major Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo works, along with the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection of contemporary art, one of the largest privately assembled collections of its kind on long-term loan to a museum.

Visitors 18 and under enter free at any time, which makes SFMOMA one of the more accessible major museums for families with school-age children, and its emphasis on 20th- and 21st-century art means many works are recent enough that the ideas behind them can be explained in a sentence or two regardless of a viewer's own art background.