Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation
Leaders & Founders · Europe“Maja Hoffmann founded LUMA in 2004 and opened the Frank Gehry-designed LUMA Arles in 2013 — one of contemporary art's most significant patrons.”
Why Maja Hoffmann / LUMA Foundation is in the Design 100
Maja Hoffmann founded the LUMA Foundation in Zurich in 2004, then spent the best part of a decade giving it a permanent home: LUMA Arles, a former industrial site in the south of France that she and Frank Gehry reshaped into an interdisciplinary campus for art, research and production. Gehry’s twisting, steel-clad tower, the project’s signature building, opened to the public in 2021, the visible culmination of a plan first set in motion when the wider campus launched in 2013.
What sets Hoffmann apart is patience rather than spectacle. LUMA Arles exists to fund and support artists’ work over years, not to stage a single opening, and its programme spans photography, ecology, documentary film and archives alongside exhibitions. In building it, Hoffmann has turned Arles — a Roman-walled town best known for its light and its Van Gogh associations — into a genuine fixture on the contemporary art calendar, and established herself as one of the field’s more consequential patrons.