Gallery of the Five Continents
art gallery at the Louvre, Paris
The Gallery of the Five Continents (French: Galerie des cinq continents) is a permanent exhibition space at the Louvre museum in Paris, France. It has been dedicated to displaying works of art and material culture from across the five continents Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania in a unified museological framework. The gallery opened on 3 December 2025, replacing the former Pavillon des Sessions and representing a newly designed institutional effort to present non-European artistic traditions alongside Western art in a global narrative of world cultures in the world's largest museum.
History
The space now known as the Gallery of the Five Continents occupies the former Pavillon des Sessions, a gallery within the Denon Wing of the Louvre originally constructed under the Second French Empire to host sessions of the French legislative assembly. The pavilion was repurposed in 2000 to exhibit works from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas drawn principally from the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, reflecting a growing awareness in museum practice of the importance of presenting non-Western arts on an equal level with traditional Western narratives. In late 2025, after renovations and a reimagined museography, the pavilion was inaugurated as the Gallery of the Five Continents. This transformation was funded in part through private sponsorship for enhancements to the entrance and visitor facilities.
Collection and display
The gallery presents a selection of 130 major works from the Louvre and other French public collections, with 77 works from the collection of the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, and others from the Musée Guimet, the Musée d'Aquitaine, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, as well as loans from international partners such as the government of Nigeria. The selection spans a wide chronological range, from ancient artefacts to historical and ritual objects and is organised to encourage cross-cultural conversation and thematic connections across continents and historical eras.
The exhibition emphasises relations between cultures by juxtaposing objects formerly exhibited in separate historical or regional departments, such as European antiquities or African sculpture, to encourage visitors to consider universal themes such as birth, death, belief systems, authority, and human engagement with the natural world.
“Gallery of the Five Continents” enters the record as art gallery at the Louvre, Paris. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gallery, Five and Continents can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137923998. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gallery of the Five Continents” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.