The Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, a three-year-old non-collecting museum, will soon depart its Montgomery Street location for a future with no fixed address. After the current shows close on Dec. 7, 2025, the ICA SF will transition to a “city-wide nomadic model,” according to today’s announcement.
The museum opened at 901 Minnesota Street in the Dogpatch in October 2022 with a solo exhibition from contemporary Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson. Presented as a “start-up” museum, the ICA was largely funded by Silicon Valley tech money. After two years and eight shows in that location, the ICA announced it would move to 345 Montgomery St. in the Financial District, a building co-owned by Vornado Realty Trust and the Trump Organization.
Nicknamed “The Cube,” the former banking hall more than doubled the ICA’s gallery space and came with a remarkable deal: Vornado would provide the museum with two years of free rent and utilities.
A year after they shifted their programming into two floors of the five-story building, activating and simultaneously advertising the previously vacant space, the museum is making way for a more permanent (and presumably rent-paying) tenant. The Wharton School of Business has signed a 10-year lease on the Cube, and will move from 2 Harrison St. within the next 18 months, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
An email announcement from Ali Gass, the ICA’s founding director and chief curator, said the end of the museum’s time in the Cube is “the start of a bold new chapter.” This move, she wrote, will allow the ICA to “fulfill our mission with greater reach and accessibility across San Francisco.”
A rendering of Lily Kwong’s ‘EARTHSEED DOME,’ in the Transamerica Redwood Park. The sculpture will be made in collaboration with Atelio. (Courtesy of Svane Family Foundation)
The newly peripatetic museum will kick off programming in January 2026 with an exhibition of sculptures by Tara Donovan inside the Transamerica Pyramid’s ground floor annex. In the building’s Redwood Park, landscape architect Lily Kwong will present EARTHSEED DOME, a 3D-printed soil sculpture.