Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, now formally the Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, opened in Paris in 2006 inside a building designed by architect Jean Nouvel. It gathers indigenous art and material culture from Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, a scope that had previously been scattered across smaller French ethnographic collections.

The permanent holdings run past a million objects, including roughly 300,000 works, 700,000 photographs, and 10,000 musical instruments, though only a few thousand pieces appear on view at any time. Among the standout works are the Fang Reliquary Guardian from Central Africa and the Dan Mask from Ivory Coast, carved by artisans the museum catalogs as Ancient Kongo makers, since colonial-era collectors rarely recorded individual names.

The museum's design, with its raised garden facade along the Seine, was meant to give these objects a setting equal to the Louvre or Orsay across the river, rather than the anthropology-museum treatment they had historically received.