SFMOMA opens May 14 as biggest modern art museum in the land

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Neal Benezra (right) stands on stairs in Schwab Hall as lead architect Craig Dykers (left) climbs the first step in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during it's expansion on Thursday, October 8, 2015 in San Francisco, Calif. Schwab Hall will be a central gathering point and ticketing area. less San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Neal Benezra (right) stands on stairs in Schwab Hall as lead architect Craig Dykers (left) climbs the first step in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during ... more Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close SFMOMA opens May 14 as biggest modern art museum in the land 1 / 23 Back to Gallery

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced Wednesday that it will reopen May 14, 2016, after being closed for three years of expansion. When it does, it will have seven floors of exhibition space, and one of those floors, the fourth, is larger than all five floors from the original building designed by Mario Bottathat opened 20 years ago.

“This is a game changer for San Francisco,” said SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “It lifts us to the top ranks for museums of modern and contemporary art in the world.”

What started as an addition to display 1,100 artworks on loan from the Fisher family has ended up with more than 4,000 new works in the largest modern and contemporary art museum in America and the largest museum of any kind in Northern California, as measured by gallery space.

The stand-alone 10-story architectural statement by the Norwegian firm Snohetta rises over the original five-story brick box like a gray silo looming over a red barn. The new SFMOMA meets the old one at a seismic joint and flows as one to create 460,000 square feet. This includes 145,000feet of interior gallery space, which is 20,000 feet more than at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the next largest.

In the Bay Area, SFMOMA is now the largest art museum, surpassing the Oakland Museum of California at 110,000 feet. In the city, the de Young Museum is second at 84,000 square feet. Statewide, its exhibition space is 50 percent larger than the Getty Center in Los Angeles and is second only to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian of the West, which boasts 230,000 feet.

To fill the space, SFMOMA has recently acquired or been promised 3,000 works from 200 donors for its permanent collection. Six hundred of these will be introduced when the museum reopens, including works by Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Diane Arbus and Robert Rauschenberg.

And that’s not counting the 1,100 works on 100-year loan from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection, which were the incentive for the new building in the first place. Some 260 of these, by 68 artists, will open the new museum. It will take four galleries just to show the Fisher holding of paintings by Ellsworth Kelly. Then there are the 24 works by Sol LeWitt, 23 by Gerhard Richter and 21 by Andy Warhol.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@samwhitingsf

For a more comprehensive report and details of the museum’s reopening, go to www.sfchronicle.com