Meet the Women Collectors and Philanthropists Changing the Landscape of Global Art

I n August 1978, the inimitable patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim arrived to her 80th birthday celebration on a Venetian gondola that passed under a banner reading “To the Ultima Dogaressa”—or the last Dogaressa, a title conferred on the families of Venice’s elected doges (magistrates) and passed on to the American collector who made the floating city her home. Several decades later, at the Gritti Palace, overlooking the Grand Canal, the city is once again fêting women philanthropists.

On the eve of the Venice Biennale’s opening, Sotheby’s gathered in honor of Batia Ofer, Kiran Nadar and Maja Hoffmann—three patrons whose esteem is measured less by the work they’ve collected than by the work that they’ve made possible. They carry on a lineage of women—Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, Isabella Stewart Gardner—who understood that  artistic legacy extends beyond the walls of any institution seeking to inspire the next generation of artists.

As Chair of the Royal Academy Trust, philanthropist Batia Ofer has championed the idea that art should not be peripheral to public life but central to it. Ofer has taken on the work of safeguarding one of Britain’s oldest cultural institutions at a moment when the broader arts sector is contracting under sustained funding cuts. The Royal Academy receives no government support, and the Trust’s mandate is both practical and principled: Secure the institution’s future and make the case for why such institutions matter at all.

“Institutions like the Royal Academy of Arts are not static entities to be safeguarded, nor abstract ideas to be defended,” Ofer says. “They are living organisms that carry forward a set of values through time.”

Nowhere is that conviction more concrete than in the Royal Academy Schools, which offers the only fully funded three-year postgraduate program of its kind in the United Kingdom. For Ofer, removing financial barriers to advanced artistic training is a wager she’s happy to make: cultural literacy depends on access, she argues, and access depends on infrastructure. The Academy stands for artistic independence, for education, for the idea that art is key to how a society understands itself.

That same instinct shapes Ofer’s collecting ethos, which she has long described as activist in spirit—informed by what she calls a preference for works that “reveal themselves slowly,” and by a parallel commitment to “quieter ecosystems, emerging voices, educational initiatives, the institutions that nurture rather than broadcast.” It is a sensibility that resonates with this year’s Biennale theme—In Minor Keys, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh—and with the broader arc of Ofer’s work, in which preservation and advocacy are understood as two expressions of the same commitment.

In 2010, Kiran Nadar opened the doors of India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) was first housed in the New Delhi corporate campus of HCL Technologies, a company founded by her husband, Shiv Nadar. The inaugural exhibition was titled, fittingly, “Open Doors.” Fifteen years on, the collection numbers more than 15,000 works and the institution has expanded across two locations in Delhi and Noida. A new Adjaye Associates–designed building near Indira Gandhi International Airport—1.3 million square feet across three floors, with 27 galleries, two auditoriums and a cultural center—[GL1] [WF2] is set to become one of the largest art and cultural facilities in South Asia when it opens within the next two years.

The scale of the project reflects the scale of the absence it set out to address. “When I started collecting modern and contemporary South Asian art, contemporary was a new category,” Nadar says. India’s homegrown contemporary artists suffered a notable lack of public infrastructure. KNMA’s collection has since grown into something close to encyclopedic, anchored in modern and contemporary South Asian art and extending into Indian miniatures and antiquities, diasporic artists such as Raqib Shaw and Anish Kapoor, and select international figures.

The institution’s international ambitions have brought Nadar to Venice repeatedly. In 2019, she spearheaded the return of the Indian Pavilion after a long absence; in 2024, she mounted an immersive M.F. Husain exhibition at the Magazzini del Sale, securing the space for the next two editions. This year, KNMA presents work by Nalini Malani, one of India’s most significant living artists, whose proposal Nadar accepted within 10 minutes of receiving it. “Considering our heritage, it doesn't make any sense that we are not represented,” she says of India’s intermittent presence at the Biennale

KNMA sits within a broader philanthropic vision that began, as Nadar tells it, with a directive from her mother-in-law to her husband: “You have achieved a lot. It’s time to pay back.” The Shiv Nadar Foundation built its first engineering college in Chennai and went on to establish the VidyaGyan boarding schools, which serve meritorious children from rural Uttar Pradesh families earning under the equivalent of $1,000 a year. Education and culture, in Nadar's practice, are expressions of the same conviction: access to institutions of the highest caliber should not depend on geography or wealth.

If Ofer’s philanthropy is rooted in advocacy and Nadar’s in institution-building, Maja Hoffmann’s is rooted in place. The LUMA Foundation, which she established in Zurich in 2004 and named after her children, Lucas and Marina, finds its fullest expression in LUMA Arles, a 27-acre interdisciplinary campus on the former Parc des Ateliers rail yard, anchored by Frank Gehry’s stainless-steel tower and inaugurated in 2021. Hoffmann committed substantial financial support to the project, but the figure tells less of the story than the choice of city. “Arles does not exist without the Camargue,” she has said. “When I decided to do this project here, it was at the heart of what I was thinking, with an urgency to preserve the Camargue.”

Hoffmann considers that sense of urgency part of her inheritance. Her father, Luc Hoffmann, was an ornithologist and conservationist who co-founded the World Wildlife Fund and established La Tour du Valat to protect the Camargue’s wetlands; her grandmother Maja Sacher founded the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation in 1933, whose art collection now anchors Basel’s Schaulager. LUMA holds these legacies as inseparable: ecology, scientific experimentation and cultural production held together under a single institutional rubric. Echoing Ofer, Hoffmann has described the Arles campus as “a living organism,” and its programming—exhibitions and performances alongside the Atelier LUMA design lab, which works with regional materials and industrial waste—bears that out. The point is not to import world-class art into the countryside but to build something out of which world-class art emerges.

Hoffmann’s philanthropic reach extends well beyond Arles. She serves as president of the Swiss Institute, NY and the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles; vice-president of the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation; and on the boards of the Serpentine Galleries, Tate’s International Council, the New Museum, the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard and Kunsthalle Zürich. Her commitments include Human Rights Watch and a steady stream of artist-led initiatives. What connects them is a model of patronage that prizes interaction over hierarchy—what the artist Liam Gillick, who has worked with her since 2010, has described as “standing side-by-side and looking together at a situation.”

Across London, Delhi and Arles, the work of Ofer, Nadar and Hoffmann sounds a single note in three registers—the one the Biennale has chosen to amplify this year. For them, a collection is only the beginning of true patronage, not its measure. At the Gritti Palace, Sotheby’s raises a glass to three women who tune our ears toward the minor key.