Inside the philanthropic collection using art as the catalyst for gender equality — and the numbers that make its mission urgent.

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Walk into any major museum and the arithmetic of the art world declares itself quietly, in wall labels and acquisition dates. Across eighteen permanent collections at prominent U.S. institutions, only 13% of the artists on view are women. In the commercial galleries that shape taste and price, the figure is thinner still — just 8% of the 3,050 galleries tracked in the Artsy database represent more women than men. Over the past decade, work by women accounted for a mere 11% of all acquisitions at leading American museums, and across Europe and North America, only 13.7% of living artists represented by galleries are women, according to artnet News.

It is at auction, where value is most publicly and most brutally decided, that the imbalance sharpens into something closer to erasure. Between 2008 and mid-2022, work by women artists made up just 3.3% of all auction sales, per the Burns Halperin Report. Within the market’s rarefied top 0.03% — the segment where 41% of all auction profit concentrates — the number of women artists represented is not a sliver. It is zero. At the current rate of change, the same report projects, gender parity at auction will not arrive until 2053.

An Institution Built to Correct the Record

It is against this backdrop that MIA Art Collection defines itself — not as a gallery chasing a moment, but as a leading philanthropic, entirely not-for-profit international collection whose stated purpose is to unite and support women artists and their work. Its mission is explicit: to make art the catalyst for a society of gender equality, and its philanthropic character has been recognised across the art world for over a decade.

To achieve this, MIA works along several fronts at once. It strives to give women in the art world the same opportunities as men to exhibit, to receive critical recognition, and to command comparable pricing for their work. It has built the infrastructure to make that possible: the private collection itself, the MIA Art Collection Foundation, the MIA Collection Residency, and a continuous programme of exhibitions in public and private spaces, alongside participation in talks, fairs and public media.

The Collection, by the Numbers

A decade of sustained work has given MIA a scale that few philanthropic collections of any focus can claim. As of this year, the collection holds 900 artworks and counting, drawn from artists representing 35 countries across every inhabited continent.

• 900 artworks and counting
• 35 countries represented
• 13 international art exhibitions staged
• 5 MIA Art Acquisition Awards, presented in Madrid, Bilbao, Istanbul, Buenos Aires and Barcelona
• 1 MIA Residency programme, based in Antwerp, Belgium
• 8 international MIA Art Collection Galas
• 65 MIA Awards, distinguishing men and women who work to support women artists in different countries around the world
• 4 collaborating curators, working from Europe to the Middle East, and Hong Kong to Brazil

The geography matters as much as the count. MIA’s footprint spans North America, Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Australia — a deliberately global reach, built not around a single market or a single aesthetic, but around a single, unresolved inequity.

Beyond the Wall: The Gender Ecosystem

What distinguishes MIA’s approach from a conventional exhibition programme is its insistence on what its mission describes as the full “gender ecosystem.” Representation on the wall means little, the collection argues, without representation behind it — in the curatorial decisions, acquisition committees and directorships that determine whose work enters the canon in the first place. MIA’s advocacy extends into those rooms too: supporting women’s participation as curators, museum directors, collectors and gallery owners, and engaging the academic world in the conversation, the slower but more durable work of shifting how value itself is assigned.

Take Part, Get Involved

MIA frames participation as the accelerant to a timeline the market has, left alone, set for 2053. The invitation carried across every MIA exhibition space is unadorned and direct: take part, get involved — a call extended not only to collectors, but to curators, institutions and the public willing to treat the imbalance as solvable rather than simply inherited.

In a market still measuring progress in decades, MIA Art Collection is wagering that art — collected, exhibited and championed with intention — can move faster than the numbers currently allow.