MoMA, Pompidou and M+ Launch Museum Alliance Across Continents

Three of the world's most visited modern art museums have agreed to work as a single cultural network. The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and M+ in Hong Kong announced a museum alliance on October 30, 2026, after their directors signed a framework agreement at an event at M+ in Hong Kong. The museums announced the deal together, and they described it as a long-term partnership rather than a one-off collaboration.

Under the museum alliance, the three institutions will plan exhibitions and public programmes together, lend works to each other for extended periods, and cooperate more closely on curatorial research and conservation. Each museum will keep its own independence and identity, according to the announcement. The point of the museum alliance, the directors said, is that visitors in any of the three cities will eventually see work drawn from all three collections, not only from the museum in front of them.

MoMA director Christophe Cherix, Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon and M+ museum director Suhanya Raffel signed the agreement in front of trustees and stakeholders from all three museums. The signing took place at M+, in Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District. The three leaders presented the museum alliance as a practical arrangement with specific projects attached, rather than a statement of intent with no dates.

What visitors will actually see

The first concrete change is scheduled for late 2027, when a selection of major works from M+ will go on long-term loan to MoMA's collection galleries in New York. A dedicated Centre Pompidou gallery is then set to open at MoMA in 2028, giving New York visitors a permanent space devoted to the Paris collection. Similar arrangements at the other two museums are still being developed, according to reports on the announcement.

Over the next five years, the three museums will also organize a joint exhibition exploring the idea of the contemporary, drawing on all three collections and travelling to all three venues. A joint steering committee made up of the three directors, department heads and curators will oversee the work, covering exhibitions, collection sharing, research, conservation and staff development. The committee will meet monthly, with one large in-person meeting each year, and the first of those annual meetings takes place next month at MoMA.

Curators from the Centre Pompidou and M+ will also join MoMA's Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives research programme, known as C-MAP, which was set up in 2009 to study art histories beyond North America and Western Europe. That detail matters because it shows where the museum alliance is aimed: not only at moving famous works between buildings, but at changing which artists and regions get studied in the first place.

Why these three museums

The three institutions were founded decades apart, and each one changed what a museum of its own time could look like. MoMA opened in 1929, the Centre Pompidou in 1977 and M+ in 2021. Together they hold hundreds of thousands of objects, along with extensive archives. The Pompidou houses Europe's largest modern art museum, with a collection owned by the French state, while M+ holds around eight thousand works, including a major collection of contemporary Chinese art donated by Swiss businessman Uli Sigg.

The timing suits all three sides. The Centre Pompidou is marking its fiftieth anniversary with a year of exhibitions and programmes called Constellation, staged in Paris and internationally, while its landmark Beaubourg building is closed for an extensive renovation. The building is scheduled to reopen in 2030. M+, meanwhile, is still a young institution by museum standards, and the museum alliance gives it a direct route into two of the most established collections in the field.

The museums also report a combined audience that explains why they want to pool their reach. The museum alliance partners welcome ten million visitors to their sites each year, and they reach 125 million people online. A visitor who follows one museum's programme online may now encounter work from the other two as a matter of course, since the agreement covers shared programming as well as physical loans.

How the partnership grew

The museum alliance did not appear from nowhere. M+ and MoMA signed a memorandum of understanding in February 2025 covering collection sharing, joint research and curatorial exchanges. Earlier this year, M+ and the Centre Pompidou announced their own multi-year strategic partnership, which included plans for the Pompidou to reopen its renovated building with a joint exhibition. The new museum alliance builds on both of those bilateral deals and folds them into one framework.

Le Bon said no single institution can encompass the entire scope of global creativity, and he presented long-term loans as the most practical outcome of the deal, since they allow key artists and movements to be shown in greater depth than a short loan allows. Raffel framed the museum alliance as a chance to widen whose perspectives shape the story of modern and contemporary art, noting that M+ brings viewpoints from Hong Kong and the wider region into the conversation. Cherix described the three museums as embassies for each other, a gateway onto three continents.

The announcement was reported by Artsy and by blooloop, which cited the museums' joint press release. Both reports stressed the same central detail of the museum alliance: the collections will be treated as a shared resource, curated by staff spread across three continents, while each museum keeps its own name, building and programme.

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