The selection features fifty stunning pieces of high-quality, traditional African art – objects, sculpture and masks – from the sub-Saharan region.<br><br>With thirty-six objects, the Cirque du Soleil is the main partner of these new galleries of African art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Almost ten years ago, Cirque du Soleil founder and Chief Executive Officer Guy Laliberté began assembling a museum-quality corpus, which provides a classic, representative overview of works from sub-Saharan Africa.<br><br>All these acquisitions were made according to rigorous selection criteria that include age, authenticity, quality and aesthetic appeal. They come from former –sometimes historic – collections that were assembled by famous European and American art lovers, including Paul Guillaume, Charles Ratton and Helena Rubinstein, among others. <br><br>On display is an extremely rare object, a Gouro female figure, purchased in 1949 in Paris by American painter John Graham and his friend, New York collector Max Granick. These mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century pieces of sculpture are being shown in Montreal for the first time. <br><br>It was F. Cleveland Morgan, an enlightened art lover and the Museum’s Curator of Decorative Arts from 1917 to 1962, who purchased the first object of African art for the Museum’s collection in 1940. A dozen works from the Museum’s collection are included in this presentation, including a major N’duleri figure of the Dogon (Mali) created between the seventeenth and the eighteenth century. It represents a figure whose jewellery suggests an elevated rank. <br><br>The majority of the works in the collection of McGill University’s Redpath Museum come from Central Africa (Angola and Congo) and were collected at the end of the nineteenth century. Five major works from this collection will be on view in Sacred Africa for a two-year period, including a nineteenth-century Nkondi power figure, or nail figure, from the Congo, into which various metal objects have been driven.<br><br>