Arts of One World | New Intercultural Wing Opens at the MMFA
After the success of the spectacular 2019 Museum Ball, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) opens the Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing for the Arts of One World on November 9. Located on the 4th floor of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, the wing’s 10 fully refurbished galleries create a dialogue between works of ancient cultures and those by local and international contemporary artists from a renewed intercultural and transhistorical perspective.
This ambitious reinstallation project for the Arts of One World was made possible thanks to the generous support of patron-couple Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery.
An exceptional tool to discover and understand cultural diversity both in Canada and around the world from yesterday to today, this new MMFA wing displays a rich selection from its collection of 42,600 art works, including over 10,000 archaeological objects and pieces by artists from world cultures. This collection is one of the oldest and most prestigious in Canada.
The 1025 m2 of the Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing contain more than 1500 objects and works by artists who hail from every continent. Located in the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion, the largest and most visited of the Museum’s five pavilions, the wing presents treasures from Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Oceania and the Americas dating from the 4th millennium BCE to today.
It invites visitors to take a fresh and 360-degree look at our ancient heritage and contemporary creations. Its layout highlights the exchange between cultures and the past and present while showcasing current disciplines and social concerns that go beyond the discourse of art history.
At the heart of a humanist and socially engaged museum, the Stephan Crétier and Stéphany Maillery Wing for the Arts of One World promotes inclusive values that reflect Montreal, a metropolis made up of nearly 120 cultural communities. It invites cultures to come together to better understand the Other in a 21st century in which togetherness is a daily challenge.
As Nathalie Bondil, Director General and Chief Curator of the MMFA, was happy to tell us:
“More than ever, we need to think as One World, or a world of togetherness as our societies fracture. We want individuals to marvel at our plurality of cultures in a world that has never experienced such close proximity. This wing represents a journey toward the Other as we become aware of our common fate as we currently struggle to achieve sustainable development and protect life’s diversity. This poetic journey refers to the extremely open and far-reaching thought of Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant. His ideas are that we must crisscross the traditions of our world and that the imaginations of humanities must change. Welcome to a wing that lifts us all up, where we can “act where we live yet think with the whole world”!”
Arts of One World — a tribute to Édouard Glissant
The MMFA’s World Cultures collection has been completely revamped. The new name of this collection echoes the One World concept introduced by Martinique poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). “Relationship” is the key to his vault of thoughts on diversity and plurality. Questioning ethnocentric views of the world and history, Glissant interprets modernity as a relational process in a non-hierarchical world between all peoples and all cultures.
Édouard Glissant wrote in his Treatise on the One World:
“I call ‘One World’ our universe as it changes and persists through our interactions and, at the same time, our ‘vision’ of this universe. One World is the totality of the world in its physical diversity and the representations that it inspires for us: let us no longer suffer to sing, speak or work from our single place without diving into the imagination of this totality.”
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