Visualizing the Museum of Modern Art’s Collection: Demographics of artists at the MoMA

Masterworks.io MoMA can work further to improve its acquisitions of artists who are women, as well as nonbinary. In a 2019 study in the journal PLOS One, researchers found that in 18 museums, which included MoMA, 12.6% are women, and 85.4% of all artists are white. It found that in MoMA specifically, only 11% of the artworks are from artists who are women. The researchers of the diversity study created a gender score for the artists included, which inferred a degree of confidence that they could attribute gender to an artist. The study elected to exclude the 54 nonbinary responses from various museums because they could not confidently conclude any artists to have nonbinary gender. However, in separate research by Piet, only 11 works out of 131,000 items at MoMA were by nonbinary artists. Klingenberg explains that compared to its peer group of museums (identified based on the characteristics of its collection, such as time periods and geographic regions), there is a significantly lower proportion of women artists at MoMA compared to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (where 18% of the artworks are by women artists) or the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles (where 25% of the artworks are by women artists). MoMA’s result, however, is slightly higher than the figure that Artnet and the podcast, “In Other Words,” discovered. In their survey of 26 art museums, the two organizations found that only 11% of acquisitions from 2008 to 2018 were by artists who are women. Chad Topaz, the study’s main author, hopes that more research breaking down acquisition trends will become common. He told Stacker, “My hope is that museums take the dedication and the knowledge from the study and other places to build more diverse collections.” This story originally appeared on Masterworks and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.