From the Whole Earth Catalog to Funk Art to the iPhone, the San Francisco Bay Area is an epicenter of craft and design. And while the two fields have their differences, they share enough DNA to have cohabitated at the City’s Museum of Craft and Design for decades.
MCD, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, first opened its doors on Sutter Street in the Financial District before blazing a trail into what is now one of the City’s hottest cultural hubs: Dogpatch. It was a scrappier institution in 2004, suiting the do-it-yourself ethos that has defined many of the City’s cultural movements. In 2012, MCD relocated to the American Industrial Center on Third Street. At that time, the San Francisco Art Institute still maintained its graduate campus nearby. Then, in 2015, Minnesota Street Project opened three blocks away, and has continued to expand, while most recently, in 2020, MCD was joined in the American Industrial Center by Letterform Archive, a collection and school of typographic design. San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art also called the area home for two years before relocating downtown in October.