Museum sights in San Francisco
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Alcatraz
Alcatraz: for almost 150 years, the name has given the innocent chills and the guilty cold sweats. Over the years it’s been the nation’s first military prison, a forbidding maximum-security penitentiary and disputed territory between Native American activists and the FBI. No wonder that first step you take off the ferry and onto ‘the Rock’ seems to cue ominous music: dunh-dunh-dunnnnh! It all started innocently enough back in 1775, when Spanish lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed the San Carlos past the 12-acre island he called Isla de Alcatraces (Isle of the Pelicans). In 1859 a new post on Alcatraz became the first US West Coast fort, and soon proved handy as…
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San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) was destined from the start in 1935 to be an eclectic, unconventional museum. But when it moved into architect Mario Botta’s light-filled brick box in 1995, it became clear just how far this museum was prepared to push the art world. The new museum showed its backside to New York and leaned full-tilt towards the western horizon, taking risks on then-unknowns like Matthew Barney and his poetic videos involving industrial quantities of Vaseline, and Olafur Eliasson’s outer-space installations that distort all sense of reality. Finally SFMOMA had room to launch international traveling shows by squeegee-wielding German painter Gerha…
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California Academy of Sciences
Finally the California Academy of Sciences has a museum suited to its fascinating collection of 38,000 natural wonders and the occasional freak of nature. Under the wildflower-covered ‘living roof’ of Renzo Piano’s LEED-certified green building, butterflies flutter through a four-storey glass rainforest dome, a rare white alligator stalks a swamp, and Pierre the Penguin paddles his massive new tank in the African Hall. In the basement aquarium, kids duck inside a glass bubble to enter an eel forest, find Nemos in the tropical-fish tanks and squeal to pet starfish in an aquatic petting zoo. The views here are sublime: you can glimpse into infinity in the Planetarium or rid…
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Beat Museum
Parrots and poetry make the air of North Beach seem rarified - or maybe that's just the heady aroma of espresso brewing and pizza baking. Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti made this Italian neighborhood the proving ground for free spirits and free speech in the 1950s, as chronicled in the Beat Museum, and the escaped parrots who flock here make it an actual urban jungle.
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Cartoon Art Museum
Comics earn serious consideration at the Cartoon Art Museum with shows of original Watchmen covers, too-hot-to-print political cartoons and hands-on workshops with comics legends.
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Exploratorium
Geeks and freaks flock to the Exploratorium to learn the scientific secrets to cuteness and grope through the Tactile Dome.
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California Historical Society Museum
Get the lowdown on California history at this exhibition space devoted entirely to the state’s history. Portions of the museum’s vast collection – think half-a-million-plus photographs, paintings by famous Californians and myriad ephemera and artifacts – are showcased in exhibits that rotate every 18 months. You might see Jack London’s flask or then-and-now shots of famous California sights in century-old paintings hung beside contemporary photographs of the same place. Bibliophiles: don’t miss the old-fashioned research library (noon-5pm Wed-Fri), which puts rare books, photos and manuscripts right in your hand. The library has the definitive collection on …
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Legion of Honor
Never doubt the unwavering resolve of a nude model. The Legion was a gift to San Francisco from Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, a sculptor’s model who married well and decided to create a fitting artistic tribute to Californians killed in France in WWI. Today, the Legion still ‘honors the dead while serving the living’ with blockbuster exhibitions, mixing crowd-pleasing shows of Egyptian art and Fabergé eggs with Max Klinger’s obscure, macabre 19th-century Waking Dream etchings. The collection spans medieval to 20th-century European art, including many works by the Impressionists and the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, one of the premier collections of works on pape…
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San Francisco Center for the Book
Anyone who can’t get enough of the sound and smell of a freshly cracked book will achieve a whole new level of obsession with these displays of elaborate Coptic binding and wooden typesetting machines. One recent exhibit showcased the creative process of acclaimed book illustrators, from David Macaulay (The Way Things Work) to Caldecott Medal winner Chris Raschka (Hello, Goodbye Window). The center offers classes, so you can learn to make your own books that fit into matchboxes, pop up into cityscapes and unfold into prison guard towers.
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San Francisco National Maritime Museum
This quirky museum shaped like a streamlined art deco luxury liner was initially a casino and public bathhouse when built by the Depression-era Works Project Administration (WPA) in 1939. The museum is currently closed while its interior is restored to ship-shape, but you can still appreciate the exterior decor: entryway slate carvings by celebrated African American artist Sargent Johnson, and toad and seal sculptures glimpsed on the back veranda by SF’s own Beniamino Bufano.
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SF Camerawork
Since 1974 this nonprofit organization has explored the experimental world of photo-based imagery beyond vintage black and white, including rotating exhibits such as Binh Danh’s ethereal portraits developed directly on leaves, Lars Laumann’s conspiracy-theory video collage of Morrissey from the Smiths apparently predicting Princess Diana’s death, and Matthew Geiger’s composite photos capturing commuter tide patterns in subways.
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Cable Car Museum
Grips, engines, braking mechanisms…if terms like these warm your gearhead heart, you will be completely besotted with the Cable Car Museum, housed in the city’s still-functioning cable-car barn. See three original 1870s cable cars and watch as cables glide over huge bull wheels – as awesome a feat of physics now as when the mechanism was invented by Andrew Hallidie in 1873.
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GLBT Historical Society
The little nonprofit that could, the GLBT HS mounts historical exhibits that rotate every nine months – a must for any gay historian. Recent well-curated exhibitions have included iconic objects such as the sewing machine that stitched the first rainbow flag. Note: it’s tricky to find; take the elevator in back to the 3rd floor.
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Museum of African Diaspora
The always moving Museum of African Diaspora, tracing connections among African communities through art, storytelling and technology. Across the street, architect Daniel Liebskind reshaped San Francisco's 1881 brick power plant with a blue steel extension to form the Hebrew word l'chaim ('to life').
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Chinese Historical Society of America Museum
Since the 1840s, this community has survived riots, discrimination, fires, bootlegging gangsters and politicians' attempts to relocate it down the coast - the amazing-but-true story unfolds before your eyes at the landmark Chinese Historical Society of America Museum.
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Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum
San Francisco's already high freak factor gets dialed up to 11 with Ripley's bizarro artifacts and tales of vampires, mutants, and human sacrifices. The cable car made of a quarter of a million matchsticks adds a nice and highly flammable local touch to the Ripley's franchise.
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Golden Gate Model Railroad Club
Near the summit of Corona Heights Park, and downstairs from Randall Junior Museum, is the Golden Gate Model Railroad Club, an elaborate collection of vintage Lionel trains.
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Contemporary Jewish Museum
Welcome to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, where recent shows explore Chagall's theatre backdrops and the life of Gertrude Stein. To keep the artistic inspiration coming.
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Randall Junior Museum
Near the summit of Corona Heights Park is the family-ready Randall Junior Museum, with live-animal exhibits and hands-on workshops (check the website for details).
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Museum of Craft & Folk Arts
Duck into Yerba Buena Lane to celebrate creative breakthroughs in skilled hands at the Museum of Craft & Folk Arts.
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