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Six years ago, the director of Hong Kong’s M+ museum, Suhanya Raffel, told cultural strategist András Szántó, in an interview for the book The Future of the Museum, that in the years to come museums will need to “stand together and work to help one another to deliver a more sustainable baseline.” Collaboration, she went on, “will be a key aspect of the next chapter of museum work.” Her words seem to have been prophetic: on Friday morning in Hong Kong, M+, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris announced a wide-ranging cultural alliance unprecedented in its scale. At the heart of the alliance is an agreement that the three institutions will treat their respective holdings as a shared collection, curated by staff spread across three continents.
“If we succeed,” Laurent Le Bon, the Pompidou’s president, told ARTnews in Paris, during a joint interview that also included Raffel and MoMA director Christophe Cherix, “we will be more than the sum of our parts, and I think that is something quite new.”
The combined holdings of MoMA and the Pompidou mean the total shared collection will number in the hundreds of thousands of objects, and the three institutions are also stewards of voluminous archives. The collection at M+, founded six years ago, numbers around 8,000 objects, but the museum has a definitive collection of contemporary Chinese art, much of it donated by Swiss businessman and former diplomat Uli Sigg. The Pompidou houses the largest modern art museum in Europe (its holdings are a national collection owned by the French state). The potential audience will be enormous: based on current figures, the museums will have a combined 10 million annual in-person visitors and 125 million online visitors.
The collection sharing will kick off with several initiatives. Beginning in late 2027, a selection of major works from M+’s collection will be installed on long-term loan in MoMA’s collection galleries, and in 2028, a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery will also open at MoMA, with similar, parallel plans in development at the other museums. (The Pompidou is currently closed for a five-year restoration of its building and is scheduled to reopen in 2030.)
As part of the alliance, the partner institutions will, over the next five years, co-organize an exhibition exploring the complex concept of “the contemporary,” which will include works from all three collections and be presented at all three institutions; curators at the Centre Pompidou and M+ will join MoMA’s C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a cross-departmental research program founded in 2009 with the aim of exploring art histories outside North America and Western Europe.
Additionally, a joint steering committee, made up of the three museum directors along with department heads and curators from the three museums, will begin to work on such priorities as exhibitions and collection sharing, research, conservation, and professional development. The committee will meet monthly, and there will be one major in-person meeting a year, the first of which will take place next month at MoMA. (Subsequent annual meetings will rotate among the museums.)
To a certain extent, the alliance comes out of previous partnerships between M+ and the other two institutions. In February 2025, M+ and MoMA signed a memorandum of understanding that encompassed collection sharing, joint research, 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 renovated space with an exhibition of works from both museums’ collections, followed by a presentation of that show at M+.
In the interview with ARTnews in Paris, the three directors acknowledged that the new cultural alliance grew out of the previous bilateral partnerships. They stressed, however, that it also grew out of the three institutions’ commonalities, such as cross-disciplinary collecting and a focus on the art of the present, as well as the lineage the museums form: nearly a century of collecting contemporary art, starting with MoMA’s founding in 1929 and continuing through the Pompidou’s opening in 1977 and M+’s in 2021. Raffel has acknowledged that Centre Pompidou was “one of the key institutions” that M+ “looked to that helped us guide the principles around building an institution like this for Asia.”“We each have things that are absolutely unique in the world,” said 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?”
This alliance differs from past models such as traveling exhibitions, co-organized shows, and collaborations on specific projects, Cherix explained, in that it is a long-term commitment to building programs together from the ground up, one that will involve “bringing our teams much closer together.”
The new arrangement also aims to take advantage of economies of scale and to make things like shipping more sustainable. Raffel and Cherix pointed out that, for instance, sending parts of M+’s collection of contemporary Chinese art to MoMA for extended periods would not only allow those works to rotate through the MoMA galleries but also make them more easily available to other museums in the United States.
In a world in which museums want their collections to reflect global perspectives, sharing makes more sense than continuing to accumulate separately. “We can’t just keep collecting, so we are sharing instead,” said Raffel. This raises the bar for acquisitions: to be added to the shared collection, a work will, as Cherix put it, “need to have no equal” in any of the three collections.
“Even if we want to be devoted to the art of our time, we become a historical collection,” Cherix continued. “How can we reset that? I think this alliance gives us exactly the capacity to have a different scope, and a forward-looking vision.”
More museums have partnered in recent years to share collections, pool resources, and expand their audiences. The strategy has evolved from standard short-term exhibition loans to deeply integrated models that include joint acquisitions, shared private donations, regional networks, and long-term international exchanges. Joint acquisitions have become increasingly common since 2003, when the Whitney Museum, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou teamed up to purchase Bill Viola’s video installation Five Angels for the Millennium.
An arrangement somewhat similar to the MoMA–Pompidou–M+ model came in 2018, when Chinese Indonesian collector Budi Tek partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in a collection-sharing arrangement with Shanghai’s Yuz Museum, which Tek had founded. (China rejected attempts to make the Yuz Museum a public institution; Tek died in 2022.) In that case, a new foundation was formed to oversee the collection, which would live in China but otherwise travel between Los Angeles and Shanghai for temporary exhibitions. Works from LACMA’s collection, for example, traveled to the Yuz Museum in 2009 for the exhibition “In Production: Art and the Studio System,” while in 2021, 20 pieces from Tek’s collection went on display at LACMA for the exhibition “Legacies of Exchange.”
More recently, museums have agreed to be the joint stewards of certain collectors’ holdings. In 2022, around 100 works from the collection of Greek industrialist Dimitri Daskalopoulos became a shared gift to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2024, three Los Angeles museums—the Hammer, LACMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art—jointly received some 350 works owned by Jarl and Pamela Mohn. Those three institutions continue to add to that collection, called the Mohn Art Collective (MAC3).