The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) received one of its most meaningful donations in recent years when psychotherapist Helen Kornblum gave the museum a collection of 100 works by 76 women artists. The pieces span the early 20th century to the present day, covering photography, painting, and mixed media. For Kornblum, the gift was the result of decades of deliberate, focused collecting.
Kornblum began collecting art after noticing a clear pattern: most art history books were written by men, and most museum directors were men. The artists being celebrated in those spaces were overwhelmingly men, too. She made a conscious decision to shift her focus entirely to women artists, and that choice shaped the rest of her collecting life. Over time, her collection grew into a serious body of work that documented women’s contributions across multiple artistic movements and generations.
One of the notable aspects of the collection is how it reaches across cultures and time periods. Artists like Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie and Tatiana Parcero bring distinct perspectives rooted in Indigenous and Latin American identity.
The collection also includes powerful documentary photography. Susan Meiselas, known for her on-the-ground work in conflict zones, is represented with images that capture real, often dangerous moments in history.
Alongside Meiselas, photographers like Flor Garduño contributed visually striking work that blends ethnographic observation with artistic composition.
The collection reaches back to artists who were working at the edges of convention in the early 20th century. Claude Cahun, the French surrealist photographer and writer, created self-portraits in the late 1920s that challenged gender norms decades before the broader culture was ready to engage with those questions.
More contemporary artists in the collection, like Sharon Lockhart, work in ways that blur the line between photography and film, bringing a quiet, observational quality to their subjects.
The historical range of the collection is striking. Frances Benjamin Johnston was photographing American life and education at the very turn of the 20th century, making her one of the earliest documented female photojournalists in the United States.
Younger artists like Cara Romero represent the collection’s reach into the present. Romero’s work centers Native American identity and visual storytelling, placing contemporary Indigenous experience in direct conversation with the rest of the collection’s history.
Roxana Marcoci, MoMA’s senior curator of photography, explained why so many of these artists had been left out of major museum collections for so long. She noted that women artists have often worked independently, without attachment to a recognized art movement or ‘ism.’ Because art historical narratives have typically been built around those movements, women working outside them were routinely excluded — not due to a lack of merit, but due to how the system categorized and valued artistic work.
The Kornblum donation directly addresses that gap. With 100 works now part of MoMA’s permanent collection, artists who were sidelined from major art historical conversations are now represented in one of the world’s most visited museums. Among them is Frida Kahlo, whose work is featured in the collection through a photograph that connects her to the broader network of women artists Kornblum sought to honor.
