Digital Art Acquisitions in 2025

Two New York institutions, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, have made acquisition and programming announcements that have buoyed the digital art sector. The announcements came at the end of a year when the world of art and technology has also seen important acquisitions by the Centre Pompidou, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; Powerhouse, Sydney; and by corporate collections including Arab Bank Switzerland and Google Arts & Culture.

These are some of the acquisitions announced in a year when the Toledo Museum of Art demonstrated the value of institutional holdings by mounting a landmark survey exhibition of generative art, “Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms”, largely from its own holdings. 

In late December, MoMA announced the acquisition of eight Chromie Squiggles, by Erick Calderon, and eight CryptoPunks, by Larva Labs, given by a combination of the artists themselves and a group of collectors, some of whom asked to remain anonymous. One of the donor collectors, Cozomo de’ Medici, posted on X:

“The moment we’ve been building toward has arrived. MoMA has acquired 8 CryptoPunks and a complete set of 8 Chromie Squiggles.” (Cozomo de’ Medici)

“Works generously donated by Larva Labs, Ryan Zurrer, Rhydon, JDH, VonMises, Snowfro, SquiggleDAO, Gmoney, judithESSS, Tomaino family, and The Medici Collection.”

Calderon posted on X that it was “Hard to put into words how humbled and proud I am to share that eight Chromie Squiggles have been collected by the MoMA.”

What started as a proof of concept for @artblocks_io and the blockchain's ability to generate entropy evolved into something much bigger than I could have ever dreamed of. (Erick Calderon)

For the founders of Larva Labs, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, posting on X, it was “genuinely surreal to see our work enter the collection of our hometown museum, and we’re grateful to MoMA for welcoming these works into their care”.

MoMA also announced the acquisition of seven works by Rafaël Rozendaal, made up of one website work, Shape Squeeze (2018), and six on-chain NFTs, all given by Neil Hutchinson and Fellowship Gallery.

In a post on X, Rozendaal reflected on the importance of being acquired by an institution, after thanking MoMA’s curators, Hutchinson and Fellowship, Erick Calderon, and the artist Refik Anadol (“for having the guts & vision no other digital artist had before”). “This exhibition [“Light: Rafael Rozendaal”, MoMA, 2024-25] & acquisition are very special to me. Not just because MoMA is a Big Name, it's more than that... My works have always been in response to art history, to painterly ideas. I chose to explore those ideas in a new medium. This new medium has its own characteristics and formal possibilities, but it's in dialog with the past.” 

“Art is many things. I am interested in the intensification of perception. The opposite of distraction and noise. Museums exist to separate art from chaos.” (Rafaël Rozendaal)

The MoMA NFT acquisitions were organized with the help of one of the donating collectors, Ryan Zurrer, founder of the 1OF1 collection, and Noah Bolanowski, 1OF1’s managing director, working with artists, other donors, and the MoMA curators Christophe Cherix, Michelle Kuo, and Stuart Comer. 

Following the announcement of the line-up of the Whitney Biennial 2026 — including 15 artists or collectives working with art and technology, among them Samia Halaby and Joshua Citarella — Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at Whitney, summarised the museum’s 2025 activity for Right Click Save.

“At the Whitney Museum, Marina Zurkow had a ten-month exhibition of three generative software works titled ‘Parting Worlds’, which included the Hyundai Terrace Commission, a site-specific work about the Hudson River and meatpacking district featured on a large outdoor video wall,” Paul tells Right Click Save. “Through its Digital Art Acquisition Committee, the museum acquired a couple of Gretchen Andrew’s Facetune Portraits and Michael Mandiberg’s Taking Stock prints, all of them using and engaging with AI. Online, the Whitney featured commissions of works by Robert Nideffer and INFANT for the artport website and by Frank WANG Yefeng and Maya Man for the On the Hour series."

Stay tuned for digital works by Leo Castañeda, Zach Blas, and Samia Halaby featured in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer.” (Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at Whitney Museum of American Art)

In March 2025, the Centre Pompidou acquired Robert Alice’s 382181_Garden City, an NFT and accompanying lightbox, as part of the National Collection of France. The work is from the Blueprints series unveiled in the exhibition “Babel I”, mounted at La Monnaie de Paris in 2023, by Marlène Corbun, the curator of the art platform LaCollection. 382181_Garden City was the third work by Alice to enter the National Collection of France, and the first to do so by formal financial acquisition.

Alice also has one work in the digital wallet of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma); three held by the Centre Pompidou and five acquired by the Monnaie. In 2025, Alice released a smaller, trade edition of On NFTs, his 2024 catalogue raisonée of blockchain art. Among the editorial updates were the edition of institutional exhibition images.

“We’ve had an increasing institutionalization [since 2024], which is covered in [On NFTs]. We’ve now got exhibition images from the Pompidou, images from MoMA, images from Serpentine, in the book’s exhibitions section, which I think really does add a next [level to] this chapter. It opens up a possible future.” (Robert Alice)

In 2025, MoMA also acquired two video works: Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer's Arc: Inverse (2024) and Carrie Mae Weems, Cyclorama – The Shape of Things, A Video in 7 Parts (2021), a gift of the museum’s International Council in honor of MoMA’s former director Glenn Lowry

Ayoung Kim showed a new Facade commission (October 3 to December 28 2025) on the giant, harbour-facing, screen at M+ museum, Hong Kong — co-commissioned by M+ and Powerhouse, Sydney, Australia. M+ also acquired works by the computer art pioneer Harold Cohen and AARON, via Gazelli Art House and the Harold Cohen estate.

Kim’s Dancer in the Mirror Field (2025), a speculative fiction film, is the latest Facade commission for the giant outdoor LED canvas at M+. It was shown every night on what is one of the largest media screens in the world, overlooking Victoria Harbour.

The work, exploring technology, labor, and identity was presented by the Swiss wealth management group Julius Baer. It will be shown as part of an exhibition reflecting on mall culture following the opening of Powerhouse Paramatta in 2026 as part of the Powerhouse, Sydney, group of museums dedicated to the intersection of arts, design, science, and technology. Kim, winner of the LG Guggenheim Award, New York, 2025, says the M+ Facade offers “an extraordinary platform that amplifies the concept” of the latest installment of her fiction series Delivery Dancer (2022–ongoing) “and invites viewers to glimpse fragments of their everyday lives within it.”

At the end of 2025, Google Arts & Culture collection announced the acquisition of 11 examples of AI art, inspired by the San Francisco Bay Area, by Refik Anadol, Linda Dounia, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Michael Joo, Certain Measures, Rashaad Newsome, Trevor Paglen, Sarah Rosalena, Casey Reas, Sasha Stiles, and Clement Valla, commissioned for “Art + AI”, to be shown at the search giant’s Gradient Canopy building, at Mountain View, California.

Another corporate collection, of Web3 art assembled by Arab Bank Switzerland (ABS), Geneva, kept the community informed of its continuing acquisitions throughout the year, via social media. The bank also sponsors the ABS Digital Art Prize, won this year by Anna Ridler and Sofia Crespo.

“At ABS, our collection continues to evolve, deepening our commitment to artists such as Ana Maria Caballero and William Mapan," Rani Jabban, Managing Director, ABS, tells Right Click Save, "while intentionally embracing the entire spectrum of digital art”.

The bank’s collection, curated by Nina Roehrs, made some 12 acquisition announcements during the year on social media, relating to work by other artists including Jack Butcher, Andreas Gysin, Ana Maria Caballero, Tyler Hobbs, Alize Jireh, Jonas Lund, Omar Z. Robles, and Erick Calderon. 

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