The drums start before you see anything. Then the crowd parts, and a figure comes through covered from head to foot in layered cloth. You cannot see a hand. You cannot see a face. Somebody near you says the ancestor has come home. Nobody laughs. That is the thing outsiders miss about Yoruba masks. They…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several reliquary traditions documented in this book carve a guardian figure to watch over a family’s dead. The Mahongwe, a small population of 3,000 to 5,000 people forming the northern branch of the Kota…
A mask is not a picture of a face. It is a sentence. Every part of it was chosen. The height of the forehead. The shape of the eyes. Whether the mouth is open or shut. If you want to understand African mask symbols and meanings, you have to stop looking at the mask as…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several traditions documented in this book borrow a neighbor’s visual language and adapt it modestly. The Yombe, 350,000 people spread across both Congo Republics and Angola, did something more thorough: once an integral part…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several royal traditions documented in this book concentrate artistic power entirely in the hands of the throne. The Zande, 750,000 people spread across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Many peoples documented in this book build their art around a single recurring symbol. The Tabwa, scattered along Lake Tanganyika between the southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and northeastern Zambia, built theirs around…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several traditions documented in this book carve figures whose missing anatomy is the whole point, but the Dengese take the idea somewhere unusually literal. North of the Kuba kingdom in the Democratic Republic of…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most art traditions documented in this book are made for a community, a chief, or a spirit, and once made, they tend to stay put. Lega art belongs to no one until that person…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most figure traditions documented in this book carve an object to represent a spirit, an ancestor, or an idea, a stand-in that the community treats symbolically rather than literally. The Lobi of Burkina Faso,…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several fetish or power-figure traditions documented in this book assign one carved form a single, fixed job. The Kongo, spread across three countries at the mouth of the Congo River, built a system where…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masking traditions documented in this book draw a fairly clean line around what a mask is for: initiation, or funerals, or entertainment, rarely all at once and rarely including anything as concrete as…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most carved figures documented in this book preserve, at minimum, the basic proportions of a body: head, torso, limbs, even when stylized heavily. The Goma of the northwestern end of Lake Tanganyika carved four-legged…