Explore San Francisco’s Must-Visit Museums
San Francisco’s magnificent museums honor its close links to Asia as well as the tech hub’s quirky love of science and progress. You’ll find museums here tracing the city’s history from its earliest days, when the bay was filled with sailing ships bringing gold-seekers to America, as well as its idiosyncratic history over the preceding centuries.
The city has dozens of museums, large and small, promising days of rewarding browsing. Here are 10 of our favorite museums that capture the local vibe and culture.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Best for Modern Art
Known by the slightly complicated acronym, SFMOMA, this museum has a mind-boggling collection of modern masterpieces displayed over seven floors. The collection is vast, and the museum was a visionary early investor in then-emerging art forms such as photography, installations, video, digital art, and industrial design.
Don’t miss the standout photography and special exhibitions. Meditate amid stimulating abstract paintings in the Agnes Martin room, then get an eyeful of Warhol’s iconic pop art, and explore the 7th floor for a showcase of cutting-edge contemporary work and intriguing multimedia installations. Sunny days are ideal for a restorative coffee in the rooftop café and sculpture garden.
Maritime National Historical Park: Best for Boat Buffs
With four historic ships turned into floating museums, this maritime park is Fisherman’s Wharf’s most authentic attraction. Moored along Hyde Street Pier are the 1891 schooner Alma, which hosts guided sailing trips in summer, the 1890 steamboat Eureka, paddlewheel tugboat Eppleton Hall, and iron-hulled Balclutha, which once transported coal to San Francisco.
It’s all run by the National Park Service and the exhibitions extend to the adjacent Maritime Museum, built as a casino and public bathhouse in 1939. Beautifully restored murals depict the mythical lands of Atlantis and Mu, showcasing maritime ephemera and dioramas. Note the entryway slate carvings by celebrated African American artist Sargent Johnson.
Exploratorium: Best for Kids
Is there a science to skateboarding? Do toilets really flush counterclockwise in Australia? Combining science with art, San Francisco’s dazzling hands-on Exploratorium challenges you to question how you know what you know. As thrilling as the exhibits is the setting: a 9-acre, glass-walled pier jutting out over San Francisco Bay, with vast outdoor areas to explore freely.
The 600-plus exhibits have buttons to push, handles to crank, and dials to adjust, all made by artists and scientists at the museum’s in-house workshops. With fun activities such as trying out a punk hairdo, courtesy of the static-electricity station, it’s one museum children won’t want to leave.
Chinese Historical Society of America: Best for Personal Stories of Immigration
Visitors can picture what it was like to be Chinese in San Francisco during the gold rush, transcontinental railroad construction, and the Beat heyday in this excellent museum, originally built as Chinatown’s YWCA in 1932. Historians have unearthed fascinating artifacts relating to the Chinese history of San Francisco, including 1920s silk qipao dresses and WWII Chinatown nightclub posters.
Exhibits feature personal insights and Chinese American perspectives on national milestones in history, including the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and the Chinese Exclusion Act, which excluded Chinese immigrants from US citizenship from 1882 to 1943.
Cable Car Museum: Best for Gearheads
Hear that whirring noise coming from beneath San Francisco’s cable car tracks? That’s the sound of the cables pulling the cars, and they all connect inside the city’s historic Washington and Mason Cable Car Barn. Grips, engines, and braking mechanisms…if these mechanical wonders warm your heart, you’ll be besotted with the free Cable Car Museum.
This intriguing museum isn’t just a warehouse for antiques; it’s the functioning powerhouse that keeps the popular Powell-Mason line running. You can track the cables as they run down the street, through an open channel, and into the powerhouse, where they wind around massive bull wheels. Head to the upstairs deck to see the mechanisms in action and watch cables whir over the wheels—an awesome feat of engineering since Andrew Hallidie invented the technology in 1873.
Legion of Honor: Best for Museum-Goers with Short Attention Spans
A museum as eccentric and illuminating as San Francisco itself, the Legion of Honour showcases a wildly eclectic collection. Visitors can view everything from Monet’s water lilies and John Cage soundscapes to ancient Iraqi ivories and the counterculture comics of Robert Crumb. Upstairs, blockbuster shows feature work from old masters and Impressionists.
Plus, the Legion’s setting rivals its art. There are dazzling views of the Pacific, with trails leading to the Lands End Lookout, showcasing arresting views of the Golden Gate. On a warm day, take a stroll down to the ruins of the Sutro Baths, once San Francisco’s most stylish bathing area.
California Academy of Sciences: Best for Nature and Science Lovers
Architect Renzo Piano’s landmark environmentally-sensitive building houses 40,000 weird and wonderful animals in a four-story rainforest and a split-level aquarium, set beneath a ‘Living Roof’ of California wildflowers. The inclusion of a cutting-edge planetarium and natural history displays creates an engrossing day out. With a history dating back to 1853, the Academy has been promoting engaging scientific education.
Today, visitors can see butterflies alight on them in the glass Osher Rainforest Dome, watch penguins paddle around in a see-through tank in the African Hall, and observe Claude the albino alligator in the mezzanine swamp. Gaze into infinity at the Morrison Planetarium and interact with exhibits like ‘Giants of Land and Sea,’ which includes an earthquake simulation and the opportunity to virtually climb a giant redwood tree.
Children will enjoy the basement Steinhart Aquarium, where they can enter a glass bubble to explore an Eel Garden and pet starfish in the hands-on Discovery Tidepool.
de Young Museum: Best for Globe-Trotting Artworks
The de Young’s camouflaged, oxidized green exterior barely hints at the fantastic range of artistic wonders within. Exhibitions here broaden artistic horizons, highlighting ceremonial masks from Oceania, trippy hippie handmade fashions, and James Turrell’s domed ‘Skyspace’ installation in the sculpture garden.
Featuring a cross-cultural collection that includes African masks and Turkish kilims alongside California crafts and avant-garde American art, the de Young has expanded minds for a century. Rotating installations are riveting, from early Inuit carvings to documentary photography from US prisons. Access to the Osher Sculpture Garden is free, as is the 144ft observation tower with its 360-degree viewing room.
Asian Art Museum: Best for Asian Culture
The most comprehensive collection of Asian art outside Asia covers 6000 years of history and thousands of miles of terrain. A visit through the galleries is a treasure hunt, showcasing everything from cutting-edge Japanese minimalism to seductive Hindu temple carvings, plus a jewel-box gallery of lustrous Chinese jade—just ensure you don’t bump into those priceless Ming vases!
Displays follow the evolution and migration of Asian art from West to East and detail Buddhist pilgrimage trails and trade routes toward San Francisco. For those with limited time, there’s a mapped trail of masterworks; parents can also pick up Explorer Cards for kids to identify animals and characters in the galleries.
Beat Museum: Best for Hipsters
The rise of the Beat movement in the 1950s was one of San Francisco’s defining moments, and it is lovingly celebrated at this North Beach museum. The collection features over 1000 artifacts of literary ephemera, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous; don’t miss the banned edition of Ginsberg’s Howl, complete with the author’s annotations and the quirky Jack Kerouac bobblehead dolls.
Downstairs, visitors can watch Beat-era films, while upstairs offers shrines to individual Beat writers, inviting guests to reflect on the wave of reinvention that shaped modern San Francisco.
