Museum report·Hong Kong
MoMA, Pompidou and M+ agree to run their collections as one shared holding
New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and Hong Kong's M+ have announced an alliance under which staff across three continents will curate their holdings together, with long-term loans and a joint exhibition programme rolling out from late 2027.
Three of the world's leading modern art museums have agreed to treat their holdings as a single shared collection. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and M+ in Hong Kong announced the pact on Friday morning in Hong Kong, calling it unprecedented in scale. Curators spread across three continents will plan displays, loans and research together.
The programme starts with long-term loans. From late 2027, major works from M+ will be installed in MoMA's collection galleries, and in 2028 a dedicated Centre Pompidou gallery will open at MoMA, with parallel arrangements planned at the other two museums. Over the next five years the trio will also stage a joint exhibition on the idea of the contemporary, drawn from all three collections and shown at each venue. Curators from the Pompidou and M+ will join MoMA's C-MAP research programme, which looks at art histories beyond North America and Western Europe.
A joint steering committee of the three directors, department heads and curators will oversee exhibitions and collection sharing, research, conservation and professional development. It will meet monthly, with one major in-person gathering a year, the first of them at MoMA next month and later ones rotating between the museums. The deal builds on earlier bilateral ties: M+ and MoMA signed a memorandum on sharing and exchange in February 2025, and M+ and the Pompidou announced a multiyear partnership earlier in 2026. It also lands while the Pompidou is closed for a five-year restoration, due to reopen in 2030.
The scale is large. MoMA and the Pompidou together hold hundreds of thousands of objects plus extensive archives, while M+, which opened in 2021, holds around 8,000 works, including a defining contemporary Chinese art collection largely donated by Swiss businessman Uli Sigg. Together the three museums draw about 10 million visitors in person each year and 125 million online. Their directors argue the arrangement goes further than travelling shows or one-off collaborations: by building programmes together from the ground up and sharing rather than duplicating acquisitions, three collections can work harder than any one could alone.
