Moments from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Founded in 1935, SFMOMA was the first museum on the American West Coast dedicated specifically to modern art, decades before New York's MoMA had any real West Coast counterpart. Its current building, a striped brick structure with a distinctive central oculus designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, opened in 1995, and a major 2016 expansion by Snohetta roughly tripled the museum's exhibition space, adding a rippling white addition behind the original Botta building that houses, among other things, the Fisher Collection, one of the largest privately assembled holdings of postwar and contemporary art ever given to a single American museum.

The Botta building's oculus is worth looking up at rather than past, the striped cylindrical skylight floods the central atrium with natural light and has become the museum's most recognizable architectural signature. Given the scale of the 2016 expansion, plan for a genuinely full day if you want to cover both the historical modern collection and the contemporary Fisher holdings, this is now one of the largest modern art museums in the United States by gallery space, easy to underestimate based on its earlier, more modest reputation.