Art collecting has long been dominated by men because they continue to be the main breadwinners and tend to make the big financial decisions. But recent art market data has revealed a surprising development: Women are spending more on art than men are.
In 2024, women spent 46 percent more than men on fine art, decorative art and antiques, according to the Art Basel UBS annual report, a survey of international collecting trends. Female collectors spent an average of $519,960, versus male collectors, who spent $355,570.
In addition, Christie’s, the auction house, said the female client base grew by 10 percent across its business, which includes luxury goods. “It is shifting market dynamics,” said Bonnie Brennan, chief executive of Christie’s. “Women are becoming one of the market’s most important drivers of consistent demand and momentum.”
Women now control more than one-third of global wealth, a figure expected to rise, according to the 2025 Cerulli market research report. About $124 trillion in assets will be transferred by 2048, including $105 trillion to heirs, and $54 trillion will be transferred horizontally to spouses, most of whom will be women.
And while men may still control the money behind many purchases, women are often making the art decisions — and proving more adventurous as collectors, in the process building active relationships with artists. The research shows that 55 percent of women reported buying works by little-known artists frequently or often, despite just over half of all respondents viewing this as a high-risk purchase.
“In the last dozen years — and especially the last five years — there has been a surge,” said Komal Shah, 56, a collector and former tech executive in California. “Women are not only recognizing this as a valid avenue of passion, but also embracing the lifestyle that comes with supporting art and artists.”
Shah, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford and an M.B.A. from Berkeley, has, over the last decade, amassed an extensive collection of work by female artists, an exhibition of which opens Feb. 27 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
After touring the 2014 Whitney Biennial as a member of Tate Modern’s North American acquisitions committee, Shah became captivated by the work of abstract artists like Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries. Her 400 pieces include works by the Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick and the Syrian artist Nour Malas, and many artists have become friends.
“The artwork in the collection has a very basic rule, which is, I must fall in love with it,” Shah said. “But the collection is truly a broad storytelling of women in abstraction.”
The topic of women and collecting will permeate the first annual women’s art forum next month in Washington, organized by Making Their Mark, a foundation that Shah established with her husband, Gaurav Garg, a founding partner of Wing Venture Capital.
Among those collectors expected to attend are Sarah Arison, the president of the Museum of Modern Art; and Denise Gardner, chairwoman of the Art Institute of Chicago. There will also be museum directors such as Connie Butler of MoMA PS1; curators like Adrienne Edwards of the Whitney Museum; and artists such as the documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier.
To be sure, notable female collectors have paved the way — among them, Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Rosa de la Cruz and Agnes Gund, who changed the history of art institutions. On Feb. 26, Christie’s is selling works from the collection of Barbara Jakobson, a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art, who died last August.
Currently active female patrons include Pamela Joyner, Kathryn Chenault, Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Eileen Harris Norton and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. (Several have helped found private museums, like Beth Rudin DeWoody in West Palm Beach, Fla.; Emily Wei Rales in Maryland; and Mera Rubell in Miami and Washington.)
“It’s OK for women to take the lead in the collections, regardless of where the resources come from,” said Joyner, who focuses on abstract art by African Americans and members of the global African diaspora. “It’s OK for women who earn the resources to deploy the resource. It’s OK for women who have inherited the resources to steward the resources.”
A new crop of younger female collectors is also coming up; the Art Basel UBS report said Gen Z and millennial women outspent men, while the reverse was true for Gen X and baby boomers. This younger cohort of female collectors includes Michi Jigarjian, Ayesha Selden, Carla Shen and Sophia Cohen.
And they are collecting differently, art experts say, with a more cooperative, activist spirit of nurturing artists historically excluded from the canon and an emphasis on giving back by loaning or donating their holdings. Some serve on museum boards, where they help institutions acquire work.
“Women care about the ecosystem as a whole, and individual artists,” said Arison, the MoMA president. “So many of the women I know buying art know the artists — they’ve spent time in their studios, it’s very personal. These women are not buying something to flip in three years and make money on it. They’re not buying it to stick it in storage. We want to nurture and grow things.”
Many artists say they notice this shift. “More women have been coming into my studio, and what’s impressed me most is how thoughtful and engaged those visits have been,” said the artist Deborah Roberts, who recently opened an exhibition at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. “The conversations feel deeper, more personal, and more invested in the work, its meaning, not just in acquisition.”
Jigarjian, 46, serves on the Brooklyn Museum board, where female trustees include the chair and vice chair. In 2024, she started Work of Art Holdings (WOAH), which invests in art and cultural businesses. “The data about women spending more resonates, but to me it reflects something deeper than purchasing power: long-term decision making about the preservation of culture and how it’s contextualized,”
Jigarjian said in an email. “It means asking: What narratives are we preserving? What artists are we supporting at critical moments in their careers? How does this work live beyond us?”
Hall W. Rockefeller, 32, a scion of the Rockefeller dynasty, established Less Than Half in 2023, a membership organization (150 so far) helping a new generation of female collectors overcome barriers to entry — what she calls “matronage” rather than patronage.
“There are so many women with financial independence and professional success who could be buying art,” Rockefeller said, “but find that the market is so forbidding that they don’t actually know where to start or even what to buy.”
Because it can still be difficult for nascent female collectors to be taken seriously by dealers, established female collectors are helping less-experienced ones. Joy Simmons, 73, a longtime collector in Los Angeles, for example, at one point called Pace Gallery on behalf of Selden, 47, a private wealth adviser who started collecting work by Black artists five years ago and wanted to buy a photo-based installation by Hank Willis Thomas. It is now prominently displayed in her Los Angeles home.
“It takes social capital — who are you, tell us about your collection, who you know who can vouch for you,” Selden said. “As women collectors, we look back and try to pull other women collectors up with us.”
These female collectors are spurring — or at least reinforcing — a growing presence of women on museum boards and acquisition committees, where they can influence exhibitions as well as a museum’s permanent collection.
Shah donated works by Mark Bradford and Maria Lassnig to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she is a trustee, as well as works to the Hammer Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoMA, where she serves on board committees.
(Gund, over her lifetime, donated more than 1,000 works to MoMA, where she served as president. Cisneros donated 202 contemporary works from Latin America to six museums and 102 Latin American artworks to MoMA.)
Some female collectors are primarily buying work by women and using their purchasing power to foreground artists — and support arts professionals — who have historically been marginalized. The billionaire Alice Walton’s foundation supports the development of more diverse museum leaders. The arts patron Allison Berg’s fellowship helps cultivate underrepresented curators, educators and administrators.
“The art world is appreciating the talent and perspective of voices they have ignored in the past,” said Simmons, who serves on the board of the California African American Museum (CAAM). “That means women and people of color.”
At the same time, female collectors also recognize that art can be a good financial investment. “It’s a smart decision,” said Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. “Women artists are still grossly undervalued in the market.”
Female collectors are spending more than twice that of men in mainland China, according to the UBS research. Patti Wong, an art adviser and former auction executive in Hong Kong, said that women often take the lead with shopping and decorating. “They are the ones who are the one going to the galleries, going to fairs, making the decisions for the couple,” she said.
Yet the art world overall remains dominated by men. Most museum directors are male. Most galleries are run by men. Within the last two years the field lost two of its longstanding female stars: Marian Goodman, who died in January, and Barbara Gladstone, who died in 2024.
And it is still rare when a major collection owned by a woman comes up for auction, as Jakobson’s will this week at Christie’s sale, “Temple of Style,” featuring treasures that filled her Upper East Side townhouse and tell the story of modern art and design.
“From the earliest I can remember, she was collecting. We grew up sitting around with artists like Jim Dine and Jasper Johns,” said Jakobson’s daughter, Maggie Wheeler, in a joint telephone interview with her sister Jenna Torres. “She loved chairs and sculptures and paintings. She frequently enjoyed them more than people. It feels like an extension of her identity. In that way, it is difficult to let it go.”
Robin Pogrebin, who has been a reporter for The Times for 30 years, covers arts and culture.
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