The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought a cache of 18th-century prints last year. A routine purchase, save for one detail: The New York institution went in on it with the Cleveland Museum of Art.
They are not the only museums to divvy up acquisitions lately. The Frans Hals Museum and Mauritshuis teamed up to buy two Frans Halspaintings; London’s National Portrait Gallery split a $3.2 million William Dobson portrait with Tate.
These arrangements aren’t new. London’s National Gallery partnered with the National Museum Wales to acquire a Nicolas Poussin in 1988 to keep it from leaving the country. But what’s changed is how common they’ve become. Pooling resources now reflects a broader shift away from the competitive collection building of the 19th and 20th centuries. Increasing financial pressure plays an undeniable role, but so does a growing appetite for deeper institutional ties and shared expertise.
“These commitments are a strong statement about collegiality, the idea that you can be stronger in opening up to partnership with other organizations,” Thomas Marks, the co-founder of Marks Calil, an arts-focused consulting firm, told me in a phone interview. “It’s a smart way to think about how high-value acquisitions can be made, and a sign of innovative leadership in the sector.”
Joint Strategies
Such deals can do more than just lower the cost of acquisitions. They can deepen collections and curatorial expertise in ways that might otherwise take a museum decades to accomplish. In 2024, three major Los Angeles institutions—the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art—announced MAC3, a jointly owned and managed collection, already counting over 300 works, that they will continue to grow indefinitely, thanks to support from local philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn.
Zoe Ryan, the Hammer’s director since January 2025, told me that the arrangement has given her unusual insight into LACMA and MOCA’s collections, “insider information” that lets each museum steer gifts toward whichever collection they fit best.
The MAC3 acquisition strategy also privileges the Hammer’s biennial,Made in L.A., which gave an early boost to L.A. artists like Lauren Halsey, Arthur Jafa, Aria Dean, and Martine Syms. (The Mohns have also collected works by these artists and donated some to MAC3.) The endowment allows the institutions to take some risks, while offering a vital vote of confidence for emerging-to-mid-career names who benefit from having their name attached to three leading museums. Ryan said that she hopes that MAC3 “will become a lens through which to understand creative practice in L.A. over decades.”
Muir said that, even after its conclusion, Tate’s partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia led to a string of exhibitions and acquisitions, pointing to last year’s critically acclaimed Emily Kam Kngwarray retrospective at Tate Modern as one example. Now that key works are embedded in the collection, “we feel more confident showing the full range of art from Australia in a way we wouldn’t have been able to do beforehand.”
Putting It Into Practice
But joint acquisitions are not without their complications. Some works are harder than others to share. Several museum experts I spoke to mentioned that films, or any file-based artworks, are particularly easy to share across multiple far-flung institutions. Examples include Bill Viola‘s Five Angels for the Millennium (2001), purchased by Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004; and, just last year, Arthur Jafa‘s White Album (2018), jointly acquired by the Hammer, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Astrup Fearnley Collection in Oslo.
Certainly unwieldy, large-scale works “might raise an eyebrow” for a joint purchase, Muir said. But even file-based works require two or more institutions to continue compromising on scheduling plans, indefinitely. Tate would seek to retain full control over pieces that are central to displays or drive audiences, he explained. Muir also noted that Tate collects “works in perpetuity, so we need to ensure we’re jointly acquiring with museums of a similar stature,” those that might also be nationally supported or can otherwise offer stability over time.
