Taking a Step-by-Step Approach to Growth

“I really grew up in the museum,” said Mr. Benezra, whose father, a second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter and art teacher in San Francisco, took him to shows often installed in the third- and fourth-floor hallways of the original building. He said he would never forget the 1979 opening of “The Dinner Party,” Judy Chicago’s iconic feminist installation. “It was very funky, very San Francisco,” said Mr. Benezra, who then watched the museum’s ambitious transformation in the 1980s and 1990s as it achieved a new stature in its own building.