Entirely devoted to tribal art, or arts premiers, the Musée du quai Branly was born of the vision of Jacques Kerchache and President Jacques Chirac, and was established as a public institution under the aegis of the Ministries of Culture and Communication, National Education, and Research. The museum opened in 2006 in a building designed by architect Jean Nouvel.
The Musée du quai Branly is a visionary and innovative institution, both in terms of its value to science and its offerings to the public. In addition to its exceptional collections, the museum serves as a center for resources, research, and education, and promotes the artistic expressions of living cultures. Each major geographical area (Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Americas) is represented in the museum. Emphasis is placed on the histories of the cultures presented, on the diversity of the meanings of the works shown, and on other important themes. Two audio and projection rooms assist visitors in placing the objects in their cultural context. A central mezzanine focuses on the contributions made by important works and studies of twentieth century anthropology.
A huge conservation campaign preceded the opening of the museum, consisting of the classifying, decontamination, and cleaning of the approximately 300,000 objects from the collections of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie and the Ethnological Laboratories of the Musée de l’Homme. Selections from this prodigious inventory of tribal artifacts are now on display in the many galleries of the quai Branly. The African collections, at around 70,000 objects, constitute one of the world's largest gatherings of such material and include objects from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, and Madagascar. Selections from the collections are displayed in a 1,200-square-meter space. The American collections, comprising over 900 objects and representing cultures from Alaska to the Andes, are divided into 3 sections illustrating the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present day, the unique nature of the art objects of the Americas, and America predating European conquest. At around 58,000 objects, the museum's Asian collections explore subjects such as shamanism in Siberia and Nepal, Tibetan Buddhism, the minorities of China, popular cults of India, the relations between nomad and sedentary populations in the Middle East and Central Asia, and rice cultivation in Southeast Asia. Objects in the Asian collections are largely of nineteenth- and twentieth-century origin, the latter in particular. The museum's rich collections of art from Oceania and the Asian/Oceanic crossover areas comprise works from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Polynesia, New Zealand, Australia, and island Indonesia.
The museum’s textile collection comprises over 25,000 items representative of the astonishing range of materials, processes, uses and forms employed by mankind throughout the world. Most date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, although a number of archaeological and historical fabrics, of American origin in particular, are also included.
The museum’s collection of photographs contains some 700,000 items, both historical and contemporary, around 580,000 of which come from the Musée de l’Homme and 66,000 from the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie. The oldest photographs in the collection date back to 1841. Images of the period 1840–1870 are one of the collection's strongest points, including an exceptionally fine series of daguerreotypes evidencing the earliest use of photography in the field of anthropology, and whose authors – soldiers, moneyed travellers, and scientists – came from a wide range of backgrounds. The chief regions illustrated in the collection are Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Equatorial and West Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.
The museum's collection of musical instruments, which was inherited from the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, comprises some 9,500 items from a variety of eras, 4,250 from Africa, 2,150 from Asia, 2,100 from America (including 750 items from the pre-Columbian period), 550 from Oceania and 450 from Insulindia. All families of instruments are represented – wind, stringed, drums, and “idiophones”, whose rigid bodies are made to vibrate by concussion, shaking, scraping, etc.
The museum also has a historical heritage unit, inherited from the historical collections of the Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, along with collections of graphic arts and paintings by French artists, many of which came from the ethnology laboratory of the Musée de l’Homme. The collection numbers almost 10,000 works and includes paintings, engravings, sculptures, travellers’ notebooks, and more.