English
Three of the world’s most prominent art institutions have announced a sweeping cultural alliance that will see them treat their combined holdings as a single shared collection. M+ in Hong Kong, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris made the announcement on Friday, describing an agreement unprecedented in its scale and ambition.
A Shared Collection Across Three Continents
Together, the three museums hold hundreds of thousands of objects, along with extensive archives. MoMA and the Pompidou each hold vast modern and contemporary art collections. M+, which opened in 2021, holds around 8,000 works. Its collection includes a definitive body of contemporary Chinese art, much of it donated by Swiss businessman and former diplomat Uli Sigg. The Pompidou, meanwhile, houses the largest modern art museum in Europe, with holdings owned by the French state.
Stay connected to every major update — subscribe and follow us on the PhoenixQ website and across our social media platforms.
Based on current figures, the three institutions together attract 10 million in-person visitors and 125 million online visitors each year. The potential reach of the alliance is therefore enormous.
Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon told ARTnews in Paris, during a joint interview with M+ director Suhanya Raffel and MoMA director Christophe Cherix, “If we succeed, we will be more than the sum of our parts, and I think that is something quite new.”
What the Alliance Will Look Like in Practice
The collection sharing will begin with several concrete initiatives. From late 2027, major works from M+’s collection will go on long-term loan to MoMA’s galleries. In 2028, a dedicated Centre Pompidou gallery will also open at MoMA. Similar plans are in development at the other institutions. The Pompidou is currently closed for a five-year building restoration and expects to reopen in 2030.
Over the next five years, the three museums will also co-organize a major exhibition exploring the concept of “the contemporary.” The show will draw on all three collections and travel to all three venues. In addition, curators from the Pompidou and M+ will join MoMA’s C-MAP program, a cross-departmental research initiative founded in 2009 to explore art histories beyond North America and Western Europe.
A joint steering committee, comprising the three directors alongside department heads and curators, will oversee priorities including exhibitions, collection sharing, research, conservation, and professional development. The committee will meet monthly, with one major in-person meeting each year. The first such meeting takes place next month at MoMA, with subsequent annual meetings rotating among the three museums.
Building on Earlier Partnerships
The alliance builds on existing bilateral agreements. In February 2025, M+ and MoMA signed a memorandum of understanding covering collection sharing, joint research, and curatorial exchanges. Earlier this year, M+ and the Pompidou announced their own multiyear strategic partnership, which included plans for the Pompidou to reopen with an exhibition drawing from both museums’ collections.
The three directors acknowledged that shared values also drove the collaboration. These include cross-disciplinary collecting and a focus on contemporary art. The museums also share a historical lineage spanning nearly a century, from MoMA’s founding in 1929 through the Pompidou’s opening in 1977 and M+’s launch in 2021.
Cherix explained that this alliance differs from past models such as traveling exhibitions or project-specific collaborations. Instead, it represents a long-term commitment to building programs together from the ground up, one that will involve “bringing our teams much closer together.”
A Broader Shift in How Museums Share Art
The announcement reflects a wider trend. Museums have increasingly moved beyond short-term loans toward deeper models of cooperation. These include joint acquisitions, shared donations, and long-term international exchanges. Notable earlier examples include a 2022 gift of around 100 works from Greek industrialist Dimitri Daskalopoulos, shared between the Guggenheim and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2024, three Los Angeles museums jointly received some 350 works from collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, forming a shared collection called the Mohn Art Collective.
For Raffel, the logic is straightforward. “We can’t just keep collecting, so we are sharing instead,” she said. Cherix added that the alliance gives the institutions “a different scope, and a forward-looking vision.”
