The McEvoy Family Collection spans generations, encompassing the collections of Nion McEvoy and his family. The collection comprises all media and is rich in a diversity of perspectives, reflecting the values of the McEvoy family and the innovative cultural history of the San Francisco Bay area.

Nan McEvoy (1919-2015) collected 20th-century paintings, prints, works on paper, and sculpture. Her contributions feature figurative works and landscapes, pop art, and abstract art by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud. Nan McEvoy and her son, Nion McEvoy, held long careers as publishers, and a shared theme of books, newspapers, and letters is reflected throughout the collection. Also noteworthy is a longstanding commitment to California artists.

Originally a collector of photography, Nion McEvoy’s interest in music, social issues, and media led him to collect a wider diversity of forms, including painting, sculpture, and video. Several themes are evident in the collection, such as music, conceptual art, spiritualism, social struggle, and humor, represented by a wide range of artists, such as Mamma Andersson, Roe Ethridge, Ragnar Kjartansson, and Andy Warhol. 

Reflecting the personal values and history of the McEvoy family, the collection is particularly strong in women artists, with deep holdings of works by Anne Collier, Moyra Davey, Rineke Dijkstra, Zoe Leonard, Laurie Simmons, and Lisa Yuskavage. A reflection of the cultural progressiveness of San Francisco, the collection is rich in artists of diverse backgrounds and demonstrating an activist spirit, such as Dawoud Bey, Andrea Bowers, Marcel Dzama, and Hank Willis Thomas. Highlights in this category include Builder Levy’s photographs of the famous I Am a Man march in Memphis, Tennessee, of 1968; numerous tambourine works, such as A Change is Gonna Come, by Lava Thomas (2020); Sam Durant’s electric light box Another World is Possible (2019); and Goshka Macuga’s Make Tofu Not War (2018), a large-scale three-dimensional collage on tapestry, which speaks to the urgency of climate action.