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The mission of the Museum of Sonoma County (MSC) is to engage and inspire our diverse community with art and history exhibitions, collections, and public programs that are inclusive, educational, and relevant.

Originally located in the historic 1910 Santa Rosa Post Office building, the Museum opened its doors in January 1985 under the name of the Historical Foundation of Sonoma County, with the focus on regional history. In 2005, the Museum absorbed the local Museum of Contemporary Art and expanded its mission to both contemporary art and history. The Museum expanded in 2011 to include the Evert and Norma B. Person Sculpture Garden, designed by Fred Warnecke, which features the work of Northern California artists. Four years later, in 2015, the Museum expanded once more to encompass the entire Seventh Street block, between A and B Streets, when it opened in a 4,500 square foot contemporary art gallery adjacent to the historic post office.

The Museum features over a dozen changing art and history exhibitions per year, reaches thousands of children though its school tour and youth education programs, and maintains a permanent collection of over 18,000 objects and images. Acquired over the past twenty-six years, the Museum’s collection of over 18,000 art and historic objects uniquely documents the art, history, and culture of California’s North Coast region from the late nineteenth-century to the present.

MSC has several focus collections that provide considerable depth with respect to artists including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Harry Dixon, Carroll Barnes, Marguerite Wildenhain, and Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel. In addition, the Museum’s collection provides the only remaining materials associated with various historic communities that no longer exist, including Santa Rosa’s Chinatown and the Fountaingrove Utopian Colony, and includes unparalleled documentation of the wine industry, and the history of Sonoma County’s Latino and immigrant communities.