San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The atrium of the museum before the 2016 renovation.

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 occupied the fourth floor of the War Memorial 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.^[5] The museum began its second year with an exhibition of works by Henri Matisse. In this same year the museum established its photography collection, becoming one of the first museums to recognize photography as a fine art. San Francisco Museum of Modern Arts held its first architecture exhibition, entitled Telesis: Space for Living, in 1940.^[5] SFMOMA 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. The museum returned to its original Van Ness location in July, upon the signing of the United Nations Charter. Later that year SFMOMA hosted Jackson Pollock's first solo museum exhibition.^[5]

Founding director Grace Morley held film screenings at the museum beginning in 1937, just two years after the institution opened. In 1946 Morley brought in filmmaker Frank Stauffacher to found SFMOMA's influential Art in Cinema film series, which ran for nine years. SFMOMA continued its expansion into new media with the 1951 launch of a biweekly television program entitled Art in Your Life. The series, later renamed Discovery, ran for three years.^[5] 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). The museum rose to international prominence under director Henry T. Hopkins (1974–86), adding "Modern" to its title in 1975.^[6] Since 1967, SFMOMA has honored San Francisco Bay Area artists with its biennial SECA Art Award.

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.,^[7] including major presentations of the work of Jeff Koons, Sigmar Polke, and Willem de Kooning.

Until the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1987 and the modern and contemporary wing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco's museum tended to function as the state's flagship for modern and contemporary art.^[8] 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.^[9] Art patron Phyllis Wattis helped the museum acquire key works by Magritte, Mondrian, Andy Warhol, Eva Hesse and Wayne Thiebaud.^[10]

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.^[11] 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.^[11]

Under current director Neal Benezra, who was recruited from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, SFMOMA achieved an increase in both visitor numbers and membership while continuing to build its collection.^[7] In 2005 the museum announced the promised gift of nearly 800 photographs to the Prentice and Paul Sack Photographic Trust at SFMOMA from the Sacks' private collection. The museum saw record attendance in 2008 with the exhibition Frida Kahlo, which drew more than 400,000 visitors during its three-month run.^[12]

SFMOMA's Oculus bridge.

In 2009, SFMOMA announced plans for a major expansion to accommodate its growing audiences, programs, and collections and to showcase the Doris and Donald Fisher collection of contemporary art. In 2010—the museum's 75th anniversary year—architecture firm Snøhetta was selected to design the expanded building. SFMOMA broke ground for its expansion in May 2013.^[4]

In July 2020 the senior curator of painting and sculpture, Garry Garrels, was forced to resign for using the term "reverse discrimination" during a staff Zoom meeting.^[13]

Discover more about History related topics

Grace Morley

Grace Morley

Grace Louise McCann Morley was a museologist of global influence. She was the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and held the position for 23 years starting in 1935. In an interview with Thomas Tibbs, she is credited with being a major force in encouraging young American artists. The government of India awarded her the Padma Bhushan, its third highest civilian award, in 1982.

San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center

The San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center (SFWMPAC) is located in San Francisco, California. It is one of the largest performing arts centers in the United States. It covers 7.5 acres in the Civic Center Historic District, and totals 7,500 seats among its venues.

Civic Center, San Francisco

Civic Center, San Francisco

The Civic Center in San Francisco, California, is an area located a few blocks north of the intersection of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue that contains many of the city's largest government and cultural institutions. It has two large plazas and a number of buildings in classical architectural style. The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the United Nations Charter was signed in the Veterans Building's Herbst Theatre in 1945, leading to the creation of the United Nations. It is also where the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco was signed. The San Francisco Civic Center was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places on October 10, 1978.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera

Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera, was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art.

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.

Frank Stauffacher

Frank Stauffacher

Frank Stauffacher was an American experimental filmmaker, best known for directing the cinema series "Art in Cinema" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1954.

SECA Art Award

SECA Art Award

The SECA Art Award is a contemporary art award program that has been organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) and supported by its auxiliary SECA since 1967 to honor San Francisco Bay Area artists. It includes an SFMOMA exhibition, an accompanying catalogue, and a modest cash prize. The SECA Art Award distinguishes “artists working independently at a high level of artistic maturity whose work has not, at the time of recommendation, received substantial recognition."

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons

Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke

Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's original space, initially intended as a "temporary" exhibit space while the main facility was built, is now known as the Geffen Contemporary, in the Little Tokyo district of downtown Los Angeles. Between 2000 and 2019, it operated a satellite facility at the Pacific Design Center facility in West Hollywood.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.

Henri Matisse. Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat), 1905

Jackson Pollock had his first museum show at SFMOMA, as did Clyfford Still and Arshile Gorky.^[14] The museum has in its collection important works by Henri Matisse, Jean Metzinger, Paul Klee, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn, Clyfford Still, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams, among others. Annually, the museum hosts more than twenty exhibitions and over three hundred educational programs. While the museum's building was closed for expansion, from summer 2013 through early 2016, SFMOMA presented its exhibitions and programs at off-site locations around the Bay Area as part of SFMOMA On the Go.^[15]

In 2009, the museum gained a custodial relationship for the contemporary art collection of Doris and Donald Fisher of Gap Inc.^[16] The Fisher Collection includes some 1,100 works from artists such as Alexander Calder, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Anselm Kiefer, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, among many others. The collection will be on loan to SFMOMA for a period of 100 years.^[17]

In February 2011, the museum publicly launched its Collections Campaign, announcing the acquisition of 195 works including paintings from Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Francis Bacon. Also under the auspices of the Collections Campaign, promised gifts of 473 photographs were announced in 2012, including 26 works by Diane Arbus and significant gifts of Japanese photography.^[18] Works acquired through the Collections Campaign are displayed along with the Fisher Collection in the museum's expanded building, completed in 2016.^[19]

SFMOMA's website allows users to browse the museum's permanent collection. The SFMOMA App allows visitors to use their mobile phones to follow guided visit of the museum at their own pace while the App tracks their location.^[20]

SFMOMA's Research Library was established in 1935 and contains extensive resources pertaining to modern and contemporary art, including books, periodicals, artists’ files, photographs and media collections.^[21]

Selected highlights

• Ocean Park #54 by Richard Diebenkorn
• The Nest by Louise Bourgeois
• The Flower Carrier by Diego Rivera
• Frieda and Diego Rivera by Frida Kahlo
• Collection (formerly Untitled) by Robert Rauschenberg
• 1947-S by Clyfford Still
• A Set of Six Self-Portraits by Andy Warhol
• My Mother Posing for Me, from the series Pictures from Home by Larry Sultan
• Untitled, Memphis by William Eggleston
• Where There's Smoke Zig Zag chair (Rietveld) by Maarten Baas
• Three Screen Ray by Bruce Conner
• Video Quartet by Christian Marclay
• Intermission by Edward Hopper
• Honey-pop by Tokujin Yoshioka

• 

  Franz Marc. Gebirge (Mountains), 1911-1912

• 

  Anna Atkins. Asplenium radicans (Jamaica), ca. 1850

• 

  Lewis Wickes Hine. Woman with Folded Headdress, Ellis Island, NY, 1905

• 

  Carleton E. Watkins. Mt. Broderick, Nevada Fall, 700 ft., Yosemite, 1861

• 

  Paul Klee. A Spirit Serves a Small Breakfast, Angel Brings the Desired, 1920

• 

  Georges Braque. Violin and Candlestick, 1910

Discover more about Collections, exhibitions, and programs related topics

Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse

Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. This extreme form of abstraction divided the critics: some praised the immediacy of the creation, while others derided the random effects. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million in a private purchase.

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky

Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent the last years of his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. The suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian genocide had crucial influence at Gorky’s development as an artist.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962), the experimental films Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–67).

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.

Ansel Adams

Ansel Adams

Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.

Doris F. Fisher

Doris F. Fisher

Doris Lee Feigenbaum Fisher is an American billionaire businesswoman who co-founded The Gap clothing stores with her late husband, Donald Fisher in 1969.

Donald Fisher

Donald Fisher

Donald George Fisher was an American billionaire businessman and philanthropist. He co-founded The Gap Inc. clothing stores with his wife Doris F. Fisher.

Gap Inc.

Gap Inc.

The Gap, Inc., commonly known as Gap Inc. or Gap, is an American worldwide clothing and accessories retailer. Gap was founded in 1969 by Donald Fisher and Doris F. Fisher and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company operates four primary divisions: Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Athleta. Gap Inc. is the largest specialty retailer in the United States, and is 3rd in total international locations, behind Inditex Group and H&M. As of September 2008, the company has approximately 135,000 employees and operates 3,727 stores worldwide, of which 2,406 are located in the U.S.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his monumental public sculptures. Calder preferred not to analyze his work, saying, "Theories may be all very well for the artist himself, but they shouldn't be broadcast to other people."

Chuck Close

Chuck Close

Charles Thomas Close was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very large format camera. He adapted his painting style and working methods in 1988, after being paralyzed by an occlusion of the anterior spinal artery.

Mario Botta building

Plans to expand the museum at its old site, on upper floors of the Veterans' Memorial Building in San Francisco's Civic Center, were thwarted in the late 1980s.^[22] In the summer of 1988, architects Mario Botta, Thomas Beeby and Frank Gehry were announced as finalists in a competition to design the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new structure in Downtown. Semifinalists had included Charles Moore and Tadao Ando. The three finalists were to present site-specific design proposals later that year,^[23] but the museum canceled its architectural competition after only a month and went with the 45-year-old architect Botta.^[24]

The new museum, planned in association with architects Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, was built on a 59,000-square-foot (5,500 m²) parking lot on Third Street between Mission and Howard streets.^[25] The south-of-Market site, an area near the Moscone Convention Center mainly consisting of parking lots, was targeted through an agreement between the museum, the redevelopment agency and the development firm of Olympia & York. Land was provided by the agency and developer, but the rest of the museum was privately funded.^[8] Construction of the new museum began in early 1992, with an opening in 1995, the institution's 60th anniversary.

At the time of the new building's opening, SFMOMA touted itself as the largest new American art museum of the decade and, with its 50,000 square feet (4,600 m²) of exhibition space, the second-largest single structure in the United States devoted to modern art. (New York's Museum of Modern Art, with 100,000 square feet (9,300 m²) of gallery space, was then the largest single structure, while the nearly 80,000 combined square feet of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles put it in second place).^[26]

The Botta building consists of galleries rising around a central, skylighted atrium, above an iconic staircase.^[27] Its external structure features a central 130-foot (40 m) tall cylinder, and a stepped-back stone facade. Botta's interior design is marked by alternating bands of polished and flame-finished black granite on the floor, ground-level walls, and column bases; and bands of natural and black-stained wood on the reception desks and coat-check desk.^[26]

Rooftop garden

In 2009, SFMOMA opened its 14,400 sq ft (1,340 m²) rooftop garden. Following an invitational competition held in 2006, the garden was designed by Jensen Architects in collaboration with Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture. It features two open-air spaces and a glass pavilion that provides views of the museum's sculpture collection as well as the San Francisco skyline. It also serves as a year-round indoor/outdoor gallery.^[26][28][29]

Ceiling architecture

Snøhetta expansion

In 2009, in response to significant growth in the museum's audiences and collections since the opening of the 1995 building, SFMOMA announced plans to expand. A shortlist released in May 2010 included four architecture firms officially under consideration for the project: Adjaye Associates; Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Foster + Partners; and Snøhetta.^[30] In July 2010 the museum selected Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta to design the expansion.^[31]

Opened in May 2016, the approximately 235,000-square-foot (21,800 m²) expansion joined the existing building with a new addition spanning from Minna to Howard Streets.^[32][33] The expanded building includes seven levels dedicated to art and public programming, and three floors housing enhanced support space for the museum's operations. It offers approximately 142,000 square feet (13,200 m²) of indoor and outdoor gallery space, as well as nearly 15,000 square feet (1,400 m²) of art-filled free-access public space, more than doubling SFMOMA's previous capacity for the presentation of art and providing almost six times as much public space as the pre-expansion building.^[34]

The expanded building includes features such as a large-scale vertical garden on the third floor, purported to be the biggest public living wall of native plants in San Francisco; a free ground-floor gallery facing Howard Street with 25-foot (7.6 m) tall glass walls that place art on view to passersby; a double-height "white box" space on the fourth floor with sophisticated lighting and sound systems; and state-of-the-art conservation studios on the seventh and eighth floors. The expansion facades are clad with lightweight panels made of Fibre-Reinforced Plastic; upon completion, this was the largest application of composites technology to architecture in the United States at the time.^[35] The building achieved LEED Gold certification, with 15% energy-cost reduction, 30% water-use reduction, and 20% reduction in wastewater generation.^[36] The Botta staircase was removed.

Discover more about Architecture related topics

Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta is a Swiss architect.

Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry

Frank Owen Gehry,, FAIA is a Canadian-born American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become world-renowned attractions.

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando is a Japanese autodidact architect whose approach to architecture and landscape was categorized by architectural historian Francesco Dal Co as "critical regionalism". He is the winner of the 1995 Pritzker Prize.

Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

David Adjaye

David Adjaye

Sir David Frank Adjaye is a Ghanaian-British architect. He is known for having designed many notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Adjaye was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He is the recipient of the 2021 Royal Gold Medal, making him the first African recipient and one of the youngest recipients. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2022.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Diller Scofidio + Renfro

Diller Scofidio + Renfro is an American interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. Based in New York City, Diller Scofidio + Renfro is led by four partners – Elizabeth Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, Charles Renfro, and Benjamin Gilmartin – who work with a staff of architects, artists, designers, and researchers.

Foster and Partners

Foster and Partners

Foster + Partners is a British architectural, engineering, and integrated design practice founded in 1967 as Foster Associates by Norman Foster. It is the largest architectural firm in the UK with over 1,800 employees in 16 locations worldwide.

Snøhetta (company)

Snøhetta (company)

Snøhetta is a Norwegian architectural firm headquartered in Oslo, Norway.

Green wall

Green wall

A green wall is a vertical built structure intentionally covered by vegetation. Green walls include a vertically applied growth medium such as soil, substitute substrate, or hydroculture felt; as well as an integrated hydration and fertigation delivery system. They are also referred to as living walls or vertical gardens, and widely associated with the delivery of many beneficial ecosystem services.

Howard Street (San Francisco)

Howard Street (San Francisco)

Howard Street is a street in San Francisco's South of Market District (SoMa). It begins after branching off from Van Ness Avenue near the Mission District, and then runs parallel to and between of Mission Street and Folsom Street towards The Embarcadero. Howard Street has the Moscone Center, Rincon Plaza, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The University of San Francisco along its corridor.

Audience engagement

The museum expected attendance to jump from 650,000 a year in 2011 to more than one million visitors annually once the new wing opened.^[37]

Board of Trustees

The SFMOMA board is chaired by Robert J. Fisher, its president is Diana Nelson. SFMOMA reserves one seat on its board for a working artist who serves for a three-year period; the special board position comes with no financial obligations to the museum but includes the right to vote and participate in committees.

Funding

By 2010, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art raised $250 million, allowing it to double the size of its endowment and put $150 million toward its expansion.^[38]

Source:^[47]

Officers

• Robert J. Fisher, Chair
• Diana Nelson, President
• Mimi L. Haas, Vice Chair
• Robin M. Wright, Vice Chair
• David Mahoney, Secretary/Treasurer

Elected Trustees

Chair Emeritus

• Brooks Walker Jr.

Honorary Trustees

• Gerson Bakar
• Richard L. Greene

Artist Trustees

Membership

Discover more about Board of Trustees related topics

Mimi Haas

Mimi Haas

Miriam "Mimi" Lurie Haas is an American billionaire businesswoman. She is the widow of Peter E. Haas, who was the great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, the founder of denim manufacturer Levi Strauss & Co.

Lionel Conacher

Lionel Conacher

Lionel Pretoria Conacher, MP, nicknamed "The Big Train", was a Canadian athlete and politician. Voted the country's top athlete of the first half of the 20th century, he won championships in numerous sports. His first passion was Canadian football; he was a member of the 1921 Grey Cup champion Toronto Argonauts. He was a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team that won the International League championship in 1926. In hockey, he won a Memorial Cup in 1920, and the Stanley Cup twice: with the Chicago Black Hawks in 1934 and the Montreal Maroons in 1935. Additionally, he won wrestling, boxing and lacrosse championships during his playing career. He is one of three players, including Joe Miller and Carl Voss, to have their names engraved on both the Grey Cup and Stanley Cup.

Irwin Federman

Irwin Federman

Irwin Federman is an American businessman, philanthropist and General Partner of U.S. Venture Partners.

Doris F. Fisher

Doris F. Fisher

Doris Lee Feigenbaum Fisher is an American billionaire businesswoman who co-founded The Gap clothing stores with her late husband, Donald Fisher in 1969.

Art Gensler

Art Gensler

Millard Arthur Gensler Jr. was an American architect and entrepreneur. He was best known for founding Gensler, the world's largest architecture firm. The firm's most prominent works include the terminals at the San Francisco International Airport and Shanghai Tower, the second-tallest building in the world.

Bradley James

Bradley James

Bradley James is an English actor. He is best known for starring as Arthur Pendragon in the BBC TV series Merlin, Damien Thorn in Damien, Varga in Underworld: Blood Wars, Giuliano de' Medici in Medici: The Magnificent (2018–2020), and Brigadier General Felix Sparks in The Liberator (2020).

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Ann Mayer is an American businesswoman and investor. She is an information technology executive, and co-founder of Sunshine Contacts. Mayer formerly served as the president and chief executive officer of Yahoo!, a position she held beginning in July 2012. It was announced in January 2017 that she would step down from the company's board upon the sale of Yahoo!'s operating business to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. She did not join the newly combined company, now called Yahoo Inc., and she announced her resignation on June 13, 2017. She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokeswoman for Google.

Charlotte Mailliard Shultz

Charlotte Mailliard Shultz

Charlotte Mailliard Shultz was an American heiress, socialite, and philanthropist. She was the Chief of Protocol for the state of California, and the Chief of Protocol for the City and County of San Francisco. She was married to former United States Secretary of State George P. Shultz, from 1997 until his death in 2021.

Norah Sharpe Stone

Norah Sharpe Stone

Norah Sharpe Stone was a Canadian-born American philanthropist, vintner, and collector of modern and contemporary art, interests she shared with husband Norman C. Stone.

Norman C. Stone

Norman C. Stone

Norman C. Stone was an American psychotherapist, philanthropist, vintner and a collector of modern and contemporary art.

Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall

Jeffrey Wall, OC, RSA is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay, and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.

Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan

Larry Sultan was an American photographer from the San Fernando Valley in California. He taught at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1978 to 1988 and at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco 1989 to 2009.

The museum also operates the Artists Gallery at Fort Mason, a nonprofit gallery located at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco's Marina district. The Artists Gallery was founded in 1978 as an outlet for emerging and established Northern California artists. The gallery holds eight exhibitions each year, including solo, group, and thematic shows. Works cover a range of styles and media, from traditional to experimental, and all works are available for rent or purchase.^[54]

In 2021, SFMOMA announced they are closing the artist’s gallery along with a publishing platform and the film program.

In Situ is a fine-dining restaurant located inside SFMOMA. It is managed by Corey Lee, the owner-chef of award-winning San Francisco restaurant Benu. In Situ offers a curated menu that highlights signature dishes from other restaurants around the world.^[55]