Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat

The first of its kind

King Mohammed VI opened the museum on 7 October 2014, after about ten years of construction and an investment reported at some 200 million dirhams. Morocco had museums of archaeology, history and crafts, but none devoted to modern and contemporary art; trade press called it the first major museum built in the country since independence in 1956. It is run by the Fondation nationale des musées, the body that manages Morocco's national museums, whose president, Mehdi Qotbi, is himself a painter.

The inaugural exhibition, 1914–2014: 100 ans de création, set out the museum's purpose: about 400 paintings, sculptures and photographs by more than 150 Moroccan artists, from the first painters of the colonial period to the present.

The Moroccan collection

The museum's core is Moroccan art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, drawn from its own collection and the national collections, and its exhibitions are the best place to follow that story in public:

• The modern pioneers, among them Ahmed Cherkaoui and Jilali Gharbaoui, two founders of modern Moroccan painting who both died young, in 1967 and 1971.
• The Casablanca School — Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chabâa and Mohamed Melehi, who built a modern art from Amazigh signs, crafts and calligraphy. In 2026 the museum gave Melehi a large retrospective, Mohamed Melehi: Œuvre en héritage (29 April–31 August), tracing seven decades from the 1950s to his death in 2020.
• Artists outside the schools, above all Chaïbia Talal, whose saturated portraits were long dismissed as naive; in January 2025 the museum opened Chaïbia/CoBrA: Au croisement des libertés, about twenty works, most from its own collection.
• Hassan El Glaoui, best known for his horses and fantasias, to whom the museum gave Sel de ma Terre in 2019, a hundred works over seven decades.

International exhibitions

The MMVI has also brought major European artists to Africa. In 2016 it held a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti, and in 2017 Face à Picasso, about a hundred works lent by the Musée national Picasso-Paris and described as the first Picasso retrospective on the continent. It has since shown Goya and Henri Cartier-Bresson among others; by its tenth anniversary in 2024, reports counted more than thirty-five major exhibitions. For 2026 the museum announced a programme devoted entirely to Moroccan artists.

Visiting

The museum is in the centre of Rabat, Morocco's capital. Opening hours and current exhibitions are published by the Fondation nationale des musées. For more Moroccan artists, see our list of Moroccan artists; for the region, North Africa.