Balboa Park: San Diego's Cultural Gem

Balboa Park

San Diego’s beautiful and bountiful cultural heart, Balboa Park is one of the most celebrated urban parks in the nation. And a big reason is the richness of its arts and culture resources. The park takes in 18 museums, from the fascinating folk arts of the Mingei Museum to the visual-art treasures of the Timken and the San Diego Museum of Art to the pop-culture wows of the Comic-Con Museum. Add such dazzling offerings as world-class theater and the park’s stately and ornate Spanish Baroque and Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, and Balboa Park is a place that feeds the artistic soul.

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego

La Jolla

Inspiring artworks compete with stunning seaside views for a visitor’s rapt attention at this luminous museum, perched on the bluffs above the glittering Pacific in La Jolla. The world-renowned Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego boasts a rich collection of some 4,700 pieces, from paintings to sculpture to video and much more. And its graceful architecture draws on the original 1916 designs of Irving Gill, a revered figure in San Diego’s architectural annals.

WOW Festival

La Jolla

From plays performed inside cars and on the beach to wild performance art that’s hard to classify but easy to love, La Jolla Playhouse’s WOW Festival lives up to its name and then some. The biennial celebration of site-specific and immersive theater, conceived by Tony Award-winning Playhouse artistic chief Christopher Ashley, unfolds over multiple days at sites all around San Diego. With its blend of inventive art, impressive tech and multicultural richness, WOW has become a quintessentially San Diego experience, and one not to miss when it rolls around.

UCSD Stuart Collection: Fallen Star

La Jolla

San Diego is definitely not tornado country, but you might think otherwise when you spy the arresting sight of a quaint little house perched precariously at the roof’s edge of a towering building on the University of California San Diego campus. There’s something a little Dorothy-esque about “Fallen Star,” part of the university’s renowned and ever-surprising Stuart Collection of site-specific artworks, all located outdoors and free to visit. And the wizard here is artist Do Ho Suh, who created the piece that sits atop the Jacobs School of Engineering. The best part is that you can actually step inside the tilted house during visiting hours and experience its disorienting dimensions for yourself — if you dare.

Salk Institute for Biological Studies

La Jolla

Revolutionary, life-saving science deserves an exceptional place to develop, and Jonas Salk — creator of the first polio vaccine — embraced that idea when it came to building his namesake research institute in 1963. Salk urged architect Louis Kahn to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso.” The result is a Modernist masterwork with a commanding presence on the bluffs of Torrey Pines. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies boasts sweeping views of the Pacific, and its signature feature is the “River of Life” that runs down the center of the 27-acre site. As Salk himself put it, the river “represents the trickle of knowledge produced by this facility, spilling out into the body of knowledge, symbolized by the ocean.”

World Design Capital Art Installations: Bay to Park Paseo

San Diego

San Diego and its neighboring cross-border city of Tijuana, Mexico, are the first-ever metropolises to be jointly named the World Design Capital, a prestigious international distinction. And as part of the celebration, San Diego set about creating the Bay to Park Paseo, an inspired series of installations curated by 13 design teams and strung along a 1.7-mile stretch of Park Boulevard between San Diego Bay and Balboa Park. From eye-catching representations of butterflies and garibaldi to a colorful and fanciful installation called “The Desert Super Bloom,” the paseo makes for a creativity-rich stroll like no other.

Old Globe Theatre

Balboa Park

From Balboa Park to Broadway: That’s just one of the longtime claims to fame of the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego’s biggest and oldest theater institution, which has sent such shows as “Into the Woods,” “The Full Monty” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” to massive success in New York and beyond over the decades. But that’s just one facet of this venerable Balboa Park institution, which was founded in 1935 and originally made its name with Shakespeare. The Globe’s summer Shakespeare Festival remains a big part of the theater’s mission, along with staging both new and classic plays and musicals and engaging the community deeply in its creative exploits. Winner of the Tony Award for Regional Theatre, the Globe is a great place to cap a visit to Balboa Park and soak in the excitement of live theater.