New York ’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Mattel, the celebrated toy company, have announced a multi-year global partnership that aims to connect audiences to modern and contemporary art in new and unexpected ways. The agreement, announced Oct. 7, 2025, marks the beginning of a collaboration between one of the world’s most influential cultural institutions and the U.S. toy and design giant, committed to redefining the experience of play as a form of creativity and visual culture.
To celebrate the birth of the collaboration, MoMA and Mattel Creations -- the group’s direct-to-consumer design platform -- are launching a first capsule collection consisting of seven products inspired by famous works from the museum’s collection. The line, to be released during the holiday season, will be available Nov. 11 at store.moma.org, in MoMA Design Stores in New York and Japan, and on the Mattel Creations website.
In parallel, Mattel will become a sponsor of the museum’s Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Family Art Lab, the interactive space where children and adults experiment, play and create while exploring ideas, tools and techniques in modern and contemporary art. The initiative consolidates MoMA’s educational focus, which has always promoted the transformative power of art and design as tools for growth and creative learning.
“MoMA has long supported the power of art and design as catalysts for education and creativity,” said Jesse Goldstine, the museum’s Chief Retail Officer. “By collaborating with Mattel Creations, we invite a new generation to experience the collection in ways that combine contemporary art, creative play and design innovation, offering interactive experiences with the works in a language close to today’s audiences.”
Mattel also looks at the collaboration as a long-term strategic project. “This collaboration is much more than a product launch: it is a global partnership in the sign of design,” commented Nick Karamanos, Senior Vice President of Entertainment Partnerships at Mattel. “With Mattel Creations we are reinterpreting our brands as design-driven collectible experiences. Working with MoMA allows us to translate some of the world’s most iconic works and artists into new expressions of culture, design and storytelling that will resonate with collectors and fans for years to come.”
The capsule collection is intended to be a dialogue between art and industry, where the imagery of the great masters is intertwined with Mattel’s historic brands. Each product reinterprets a work from the museum’s collection through the languages of play and industrial design. The famous Barbie, for example, is inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece The Starry Night: the Barbie x Vincent van Gogh doll’s dress recalls the painting’s swirling skies, with a crescent moon detail among the curls and sculpted heels that echo the undulations of the landscape.
Instead, the world of miniature cars is represented by two Hot Wheels models. The first, Hot Wheels x Jaguar E-Type Roadster, is a scale replica of the Jaguar E-Type Roadster, called “the most beautiful car ever made” and celebrated in MoMA for its aerodynamic lines and revolutionary design. The second, Hot Wheels x Citroën DS 23 Sedan, pays homage to the Citroën DS 23 Sedan, an icon of the French automotive industry and a symbol of technological avant-garde for its innovative suspension and futuristic shape.
The collaboration also extends to the UNO card game, reinterpreted in a special UNO Canvas x MoMA edition, which includes six works from the collection: from the geometric colors of Sonia Delaunay and Piet Mondrian, to compositions by Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Liubov Popova, and Vincent van Gogh, each matched with the colors and dynamics of the famous game.
Another creative reinterpretation involves the Magic 8 Ball, which with Magic 8 Ball x Alma Wood sey Thomas has been revamped in the colors and motifs of African-American artist Alma Woodsey Thomas. The object, inspired by her painting Untitled, includes nine motivational phrases such as “Color is Life!” that recall the chromatic and spiritual vitality of her work.
Completing the collection are two sets from the Little People Collector line, dedicated to Salvador Dalí(Little People Collector x Salvador Dalí) and Claude Monet(Little People Collector x Claude Monet), respectively. The former evokes the surreal world of the Catalan painter and includes a playful self-portrait and a figure inspired by The Persistence of Memory, while the latter reproduces Monet’s Impressionist universe, with a miniature of the painter alongside a small painting of him immersed among his famous Water Lilies.
With this capsule, MoMA and Mattel aim to open a new chapter in the dialogue between art and design, inviting the public to discover masterpieces from the collection through objects that combine aesthetics, innovation and play. The collaboration is presented as a bridge between languages and generations: on the one hand, the artistic heritage guarded by the museum, and on the other, the industrial creativity of a brand that has marked the popular imagination of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The partnership between the museum and the company is thus not limited to the production of objects, but proposes a new model of collaboration between cultural institutions and commercial brands, based on the idea that design can be a universal language capable of bringing people closer to art and renewing their perception of it. For more information and to discover the collection, you can visit Mattel Creations’ websites and store.moma.org.
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| Mattel has created a line of toys and objects in collaboration with New York's MoMA |
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