California

With its vantage point on the cutting edge of the Pacific Rim, local technology savvy and prodigious collection of photography, 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, suddenly 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 toward the 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 Gerhardt Richter and great postwar Japanese photographers such as Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama. The 1995 reopening coincided with the tech boom, and new media art took off in the SFMOMA galleries at roughly the same time as new technologies in nearby South Park.

The permanent collection includes work by all the great American and European artists but is particularly strong in American abstract expressionism, with major works by Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, and in fauvism, with works such as Henri Matisse's 1905 masterpiece Femme au Chapeau. The permanent collection also contains several works by Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and by Bay Area artists Robert Arneson and Richard Diebenkorn. Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp, Rene Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol are all represented.