San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA)

The San Diego Museum of Art is located in the heart of the historic Balboa Park, alongside 14 other museums, lush gardens and 100-year-old trees. Its collection of more than 32,000 works — dating from 3000 B.C. to present day — is noted for its Spanish and Italian old masters, South Asian paintings, East Asian art, American art and modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures, plus one of the strongest collections of German expressionism in the United States. The museum first opened in 1926 as the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, almost a decade after the Panama-California International Exposition, held in the park in 1915-16, ignited local interest in a permanent fine arts space. Today, the museum regularly features major exhibitions of art from around the world and offers community programs that include concerts, performances and lectures. In 2016, as part of a crowdfunded “free the art” campaign, the museum installed seven large-scale sculptures in its outdoor plaza featuring works by August Rodin and Joan Miró. Recent acquisitions have brought artworks by Lucas Cranach the Younger, Martin Puryear, Alison Saar, John Singer Sargent and Jusepe de Ribera to an already impressive collection.