The hook
A major contemporary-art museum downtown, wrapped in a honeycomb shell, is free to walk into, and it holds one of Yayoi Kusama's infinity mirror rooms.
01Why it's worth it
The billionaire Eli Broad built this to house his contemporary collection, opened it in 2015, and insisted admission stay free so that money wouldn't decide who gets to see art. The building itself is worth the visit: a design called "the veil and the vault," a porous honeycomb skin that filters daylight down onto galleries hung with two thousand of the biggest names in postwar and contemporary art. The piece everyone lines up for is Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room, a small mirror-lined chamber of hanging lights that you step into alone for a moment and lose all sense of where the walls are. It's one of the few world-class museums anywhere that costs nothing to enter.
02How to experience it
It's on Grand Avenue downtown, next to Disney Hall, about six hours from the Bay. General admission is free but timed tickets book up, so reserve ahead; the Infinity Room takes a separate reservation and short line inside. Give it a couple of hours, and pair it with Grand Central Market and the Bradbury nearby.