January 24–July 26, 2026

On February 28, 1926, the Fine Arts Gallery—now The San Diego Museum of Art—opened its doors to three-thousand visitors eager to experience the refined “plateresque” architecture of its façade and the burgeoning collection of San Diego’s first art museum. Over the next hundred years, millions of guests, thousands of artists and volunteers, hundreds of donors and staff, and seven directors coauthored a shared history of the Museum and its place in the region’s growing cultural heritage.

SDMA 100 Years presents photographs, ephemera, and film footage of key moments in the Museum’s history of engagement with the community through decades of world-altering change. Beginning with photographs of Kumeyaay villages from the area, the exhibition looks at the Museum’s evolution from its birth at the 1915 Panama–California Exposition, to its grand opening in 1926, the conversion into a naval hospital during World War II, the modernization of Balboa Park in the 1960s and 1970s, the fanfare of blockbuster exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s, renewal for the turn of the millennium, and a reimagined future for the next hundred years.

Special thanks are due to the support of the Art Pratt Foundation, the San Diego History Center, San Diego Archives, Heritage Architecture, Golden Gate Archives, CBS8, and to Lucas Justinien Pérez, for his extensive research and care of the SDMA archives.

Featured at top right: Construction of the façade of the Fine Arts Gallery, now The San Diego Museum of Art, 1925. The San Diego Museum of Art Archives.