Six years ago, Suhanya Raffel, the director of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, shared a vision for the future of the cultural sector with cultural strategist Andrés Szántó during an interview for the book The Future of the Museum. She predicted that in the years to come, museums would need to “stand together and work to help one another to deliver a more sustainable baseline,” adding that collaboration “will be a key aspect of the next chapter of museum work.”
That prophetic statement materialized on a Friday morning in Hong Kong, where M+, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris jointly announced a wide-ranging cultural alliance of unprecedented scale. At the core of this landmark agreement is a radical commitment: the three world-class institutions will treat their respective holdings as a single shared collection, curated by professional staff spread across three continents.
“If we succeed,” Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou, told ARTnews in Paris during a joint interview that also featured Raffel and MoMA director Christophe Cherix, “we will be more than the sum of our parts, and I think that is something quite new.”
Combining Global Resources and Audiences
The combined holdings of MoMA and the Centre Pompidou alone mean that the total shared collection will encompass hundreds of thousands of objects, supported by voluminous archives. While M+ was founded only six years ago and numbers around 8,000 objects in its inventory, it boasts a definitive collection of contemporary Chinese art, much of it secured through generous donations from Swiss businessman and former diplomat Uli Sigg.
Meanwhile, the Centre Pompidou houses the largest modern art museum in Europe, anchored by a national collection owned by the French state. Together, the potential audience for this tri-continental network is enormous. Based on current operational figures, the three institutions draw a combined 10 million in-person visitors annually alongside a staggering 125 million online visitors, instantly expanding the global reach of their respective programs.
Phased Rollout and Long-Term Initiatives
The collection-sharing framework will kick off with several high-profile initiatives designed to bring the partnership to life. Beginning in late 2027, a carefully curated selection of major works from the M+ collection will be installed on long-term loan within MoMA’s core collection galleries. This will be followed in 2028 by the opening of a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery space at MoMA, with parallel integration plans simultaneously under development at the other participating museums. (Notably, the Centre Pompidou is currently closed to the public for a comprehensive five-year architectural restoration of its iconic building, with its grand reopening scheduled for 2030.)
As an extension of the alliance, the partner institutions will co-organize an ambitious exhibition over the next five years exploring the complex, evolving concept of “the contemporary.” This flagship project will feature works drawn from all three collections and will travel for presentation at each of the partner institutions. Furthermore, curators from the Centre Pompidou and M+ will formally integrate into MoMA’s C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a cross-departmental research program established in 2009 with the explicit aim of broadening art historical narratives beyond North America and Western Europe.
Operational governance will be managed by a joint steering committee comprising the three museum directors, key department heads, and senior curators. The committee is set to convene monthly, supplemented by one major in-person meeting annually. The inaugural annual meeting will take place next month at MoMA, with subsequent yearly gatherings rotating among the partner museums.
Deepening Bilateral Roots into a Global Network
To a certain extent, this sweeping alliance builds naturally upon earlier bilateral partnerships forged between M+ and its institutional peers. In February 2025, M+ and MoMA signed a comprehensive memorandum of understanding encompassing collection sharing, joint research initiatives, and curatorial exchanges. Earlier this year, M+ and the Centre Pompidou announced their own multiyear strategic partnership, which included plans for the Pompidou to inaugurate its newly renovated Paris home with an exhibition featuring works from both museum collections, followed by a reciprocal presentation at M+.
During their interview with ARTnews, the three directors acknowledged that while the global alliance grew organically out of these previous bilateral agreements, it is fundamentally rooted in their shared institutional DNA. They highlighted commonalities such as cross-disciplinary collecting philosophies, an unwavering focus on the art of the present, and a collective historical lineage spanning nearly a century of contemporary art stewardship—beginning with MoMA’s founding in 1929, continuing with the Pompidou’s opening in 1977, and culminating with the establishment of M+ in 2021. Raffel has frequently noted that the Centre Pompidou served as “one of the key institutions” that M+ looked to for guidance when establishing institutional principles for Asia.
“We each have things that are absolutely unique in the world,” said MoMA director Christophe Cherix. “Our first role is of course preservation. But how can we make those collections work harder for us and touch people well beyond the walls of our institutions?”
Cherix emphasized that this alliance fundamentally breaks from historical models such as standard traveling exhibitions, co-organized shows, or isolated project collaborations. Instead, it represents a deep, long-term commitment to co-creating programs from the ground up, designed to bring their respective institutional teams much closer together.
Sustainability, Acquisition, and Shifting Paradigms
The partnership also aims to capture critical economies of scale and dramatically improve the environmental sustainability of international art logistics, such as shipping. Raffel and Cherix pointed out that rotating parts of M+’s substantial contemporary Chinese art collection into MoMA galleries for extended periods will not only enrich MoMA’s permanent displays but also make those important works significantly more accessible to other cultural institutions across the United States.
In an era where museums increasingly strive to reflect truly global perspectives, the directors argued that resource-sharing makes far more operational and curatorial sense than continuing to accumulate holdings independently.
“We can’t just keep collecting, so we are sharing instead,” Raffel said.
This philosophy directly elevates the standards for future acquisitions. To be admitted into the shared collection, a prospective artwork will, in Cherix’s words, “need to have no equal” within any of the three participating institutions.
“Even if we want to be devoted to the art of our time, we become a historical collection,” Cherix reflected. “How can we reset that? I think this alliance gives us exactly the capacity to have a different scope, and a forward-looking vision.”
The Evolution of Museum Collaborations
The announcement reflects a broader industry trend in recent years, as more museums form strategic partnerships to share collections, pool financial and operational resources, and expand their audiences. Over time, this collaborative strategy has evolved from traditional, short-term exhibition loans into deeply integrated models featuring joint acquisitions, shared private donations, regional networks, and long-term international exchanges.
Joint acquisitions have steadily grown in popularity across the art world since 2003, when the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou famously teamed up to jointly purchase Bill Viola’s immersive video installation Five Angels for the Millennium.
A structural arrangement somewhat comparable to the MoMA-Pompidou-M+ model emerged in 2018, when Chinese-Indonesian collector Budi Tek partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in a collection-sharing agreement tied to Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, which Tek had founded. Although Chinese regulatory hurdles ultimately prevented the Yuz Museum from operating as a public institution prior to Tek’s passing in 2022, the arrangement established a dedicated foundation to oversee a collection that rotated between Los Angeles and Shanghai for temporary exhibitions, following earlier precedents like LACMA sending works to Shanghai for the 2009 exhibition In Production: Art and the Studio System.
More recently, major institutions have increasingly formalized joint stewardship over significant private collections. In 2022, approximately 100 works from the premier collection of Greek industrialist Dimitri Daskalopoulos were established as a shared gift to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Similarly, in 2024, three prominent Los Angeles institutions—the Hammer Museum, LACMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA)—jointly received a major acquisition of roughly 350 works amassed by collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn. Those three institutions continue to actively build upon that shared holding, known collectively as the Mohn Art Collective (MAC3).
