The Helen Kornblum Collection is a collection of artworks by women artists donated to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by psychotherapist Helen Kornblum. The collection consists of 100 works of art by 76 women and spans the early 20th century to the present day. According to Kornblum, she began collecting art and realized that most art history books and museum directors were men. She decided to focus on collecting artworks by women, which changed her life in many ways.
The donation of the Kornblum Collection to MoMA was significant because it added significant examples of women artists’ pioneering achievements to the museum’s collection, which works had traditionally dominated by male artists. According to Roxana Marcoci, the senior curator of photography at MoMA, this is because most women artists have not necessarily been affiliated with an ‘ism’ and have often worked as independent agents, unjustifiably left out of art historical discourses. The collection will help to change the discourse and will be a significant addition to MoMA’s collection and the representation of women artists in the museum.
