M+ Hong Kong · MoMA New York — Two Institutional Visions of Global Art

18,203 M+ objects · 160,585 MoMA objects · 124 countries across both collections · Data: M+ GraphQL API + MoMA open data (GitHub)

18,203
M+ Objects
1,542 unique artists · founded 2021
160,585
MoMA Objects
14,372 unique artists · founded 1929
124
Countries across both collections
39 in both · 82 MoMA only · 3 M+ only
85% · 51%
Home region concentration
M+ artists from Asia-Pacific · MoMA artists from the US
Analysis 1
Two different maps of the world
The 35 countries with the largest combined presence, plotted by their share of M+ artists with known nationality (x-axis) vs share of MoMA artists with known nationality (y-axis), log scale. Countries on the diagonal carry equal weight in both collections. Countries far off it reveal the structural choices each institution has made. Color encodes 3× dominance ratio. Hover for detail.
M+ dominant (3× ratio)
MoMA dominant (3× ratio)
Balanced presence

Structural divergences

Analysis 2
The geography of institutional attention
Bubble size = unique artists from that country. Color = 3× dominance ratio (same rule as scatter above). MoMA's reach across Latin America and Eastern Europe reflects a century of acquisitions anchored in the Atlantic axis. M+'s concentration in East and Southeast Asia maps a different set of decisions about where contemporary art originates.
M+ dominant (3× ratio)
MoMA dominant (3× ratio)
Balanced presence
Analysis 3
What counts as art
MoMA organizes 75% of its collection under Visual Art — a category rooted in the Western academic hierarchy of painting and sculpture as the primary cultural form. M+ inverts this: 62% of its collection is Design and Architecture, treating the built environment, industrial objects, and graphic culture as equal nodes of visual history. The disciplinary difference is structural, not incidental.
Analysis 4
Gender and the pace of change
Female share of artists with known gender, by birth decade. The trajectory is similar in both collections — rising sharply among artists born after 1950 — but the starting point differs. MoMA's deeper historical record shows how thoroughly male the 20th-century canon was structured to be. The high unknown gender rate at M+ (19% vs MoMA's 5%) is itself a data quality signal: M+ publishes less biographical metadata, which limits this analysis and should be read accordingly.
M+
MoMA
% Female artists (of known gender)

Decades 1880–1980 where both collections have meaningful sample sizes. % shown of artists with known gender only. M+ unknown: ~19% · MoMA unknown: ~5% — figures are lower bounds, particularly for M+.

Artist count by birth decade (log scale)
Analysis 5
Which moment in time each collection claims
M+ median creation year: 1984. MoMA median: 1960. The 24-year gap is not simply a function of MoMA's age — it reflects the weight of a century of acquisitions concentrated in the early-to-mid 20th century, the period when Western modernism defined itself as universal. M+'s collection, assembled from the late 1990s onward, anchors itself in a different era: post-colonial, post-analogue, and post-Western-consensus.
M+
MoMA
% of collection by creation decade
Cumulative distribution
Analysis 6
The palette of M+ — a dataset MoMA does not publish
213 representative colors sampled from 9,369 M+ artworks via the M+ GraphQL API, sorted by hue. Each bar represents a cluster of works sharing a dominant color exceeding 20% of the image. MoMA's open data includes no color information. The decision to publish machine-readable color data — or not — is itself an institutional choice about what aspects of a collection are made legible to researchers.
The palette skews heavily neutral — grays, whites, and near-blacks dominate, reflecting the prevalence of photography (8,965 works), architectural drawings, and archival documentation in a collection defined as much by evidence as by expression. Saturated color appears in bursts: the reds and pinks of Design and Architecture posters and product objects, the deep blues concentrated in Moving Image works. The spectrum is a fingerprint of what M+ chose to preserve — and what it chose to digitize.
Methodology and data limitations Nationality → country mapping via a static lookup table. Diaspora artists, stateless persons, and historical states (USSR, Yugoslavia) are simplified to a successor country — a reduction that erases complexity, particularly for artists whose national identity is contested or multiple. Geographic coverage: 80% M+ (nationality absent in the API for 19.9% of objects), 95.6% MoMA. Scatter and map percentages are computed on artists with known nationality only (M+: ~1,098 · MoMA: ~13,571), not the full artist counts in the KPIs. The 15-point coverage gap itself reflects a difference in how much biographical metadata each institution publishes. Gender: M+ 80.8% populated, MoMA 94.6% — all female % figures are of artists with known gender only and should be read as lower bounds, particularly for M+. Area comparison: MoMA departments were manually mapped to M+'s three-area taxonomy; 1,683 Fluxus Collection records excluded. MoMA area N shown as 158,902 (excluding Fluxus), not the full 160,585.