Not to miss

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

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.

Creativity Explored

This is an extraordinary nonprofit celebrating art without limits, where 100 developmentally disabled artists create alongside other professional artists. Recent themed group shows have covered art inspired by jazz, superheroes and super-villains, and mail art. Don't miss the art openings, which are joyous events.

Works created here are often snapped up by collectors and included in shows across the nation, and a recent show was organized by the curator of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Aquarium Of The Bay

Watch sharks circle overhead, manta rays skate shyly by and seaweed sway all around, as conveyer belts guide you through glass tubes right into the Bay. Not for the claustrophobic, perhaps, but a thrilling fish-eye view of San Francisco that leaves kids and parents wide-eyed and humming Little Mermaid tunes.