The Asian Art Museum, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, announced plans today to invest in the museum’s future by adding a 12,000-square-foot special exhibition pavilion and by updating and repurposing existing spaces to better serve its audiences. The new pavilion will underscore San Francisco’s cultural diversity, create one of the nation’s premier exhibition spaces dedicated to Asian art, and increase the number of special exhibitions on view for visitors.  

Slated to begin work in 2017, the pavilion will add about 9,000 square feet of unified gallery space to the east side of the museum’s first floor. It will sit atop an existing lower-level wing on the museum’s Hyde Street side that was built in the 1990s. The new pavilion will be one of San Francisco’s largest art exhibition spaces.  

Also planned is an updating of the museum’s education classrooms to serve 50,000 Bay Area schoolchildren and teachers a year, a third more than the 35,000 school program participants the museum welcomes today. Repurposing other spaces will also create more flexible areas for cultural and community engagement.  

The improvements reflect insights gleaned over the 13 years since the museum moved to San Francisco’s Civic Center, its first dedicated home since it opened its doors in 1966 sharing space with the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.