Museums
The Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) contains 20th Century and contemporary pieces. It moved to its iconic building in South of Market in 1995 and attracts 600,000 visitors annually. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor contains primarily European works. The De Young Museum and the Asian Art Museum have significant anthropological and non-European holdings.
The Palace of Fine Arts, a remnant of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, today houses the Exploratorium, a popular science museum dedicated to teaching through hands-on interaction. The California Academy of Sciences is a natural history museum and hosts the Morrison Planetarium and Steinhart Aquarium. The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world. From 1958 until 2003 the collection was housed in a wing of at the original de Young in Golden Gate Park. When the de Young closed while constructing a new building, the Asian Art Museum moved to the former San Francisco City Library building, which was renovated for the purpose under the direction of Italian architect Gae Aulenti who had previously overseen the conversion of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
The San Francisco Zoo cares for a total of about 250 animal species, 39 of which have been deemed endangered or threatened.
Other museums include the Museum of the African Diaspora, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Museum of Craft & Folk Art, the Cartoon Art Museum, and the Mexican Museum. San Francisco's eccentric nature has also created some "offbeat" museums dealing in unconventional topics. Such museums and galleries include the Antique Vibrator Museum, the Musée Mécanique (dedicated to penny arcade machines), Museum of Ophthalmology, Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum, the Stamp Francisco/Stamp Art Gallery (rubber stamps not postal stamps), the Tattoo Art Museum (old tattoo machines and instruments), the UFO, Bigfoot and Loch Ness Monster Museum, and the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf.
The Haas-Lilienthal House (2007 Franklin Street) is the only intact private Victorian-era home in San Francisco that is open to the public year-round and available for private functions. Three generations of the Haas and Lilienthal descendants lived in this house after which the house was donated to The Foundation for San Francisco’s Architectural Heritage (later renamed San Francisco Architectural Heritage). It was open to the public for tours in 1972.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of San Francisco
Famous quotes containing the word museums:
“In museums and palaces we are alternate radicals and conservatives.”
—Henry James (1843–1816)
“Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters.... We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.”
—Pablo Picasso (1881–1973)