San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

This guide to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art follows Grace McCann Morley, the young director who opened the museum in a borrowed room in January 1935 with almost nothing to its name and a conviction that modern art belonged to everyone. It traces her run of seventy to a hundred shows a year, mostly safe European names, until 1945, when she took a bet almost no other American museum would: a full solo show for a volatile, largely unknown painter named Jackson Pollock, years before he became famous. She made the same gamble on Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Look around at the galleries and notice how much of what hangs here started as a risk nobody else would take.