Musee du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac

The Musee du quai Branly: Jacques Chirac is a national museum in Paris dedicated to the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, opened in 2006 to the design of the architect Jean Nouvel and renamed in 2016 for the French president who championed its creation. Its collection descends from two merged predecessor institutions: the Musee de l'Homme, the 1937 scientific successor to the 1878 Musee d'Ethnographie du Trocadero, and the Musee national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie, the former 1931 colonial museum reorganised in 1961 around an art historical rather than ethnographic mandate. It is a public institution under the French Ministry of Culture, and its collections were built up across two centuries of French colonial era and postcolonial acquisition, a history the museum's own published scholarship now addresses directly, including active restitution work such as the 2021 return of twenty six royal objects to Benin. Its relevance to this atlas is as custodian of record for a range of religious and ritual objects, including crystal skulls acquired by the Trocadero in the nineteenth century and still held in the collection today.