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Ashanti Gold Mask: History, Symbolism, and Royal Significance in Ghana
The Ashanti people of Ghana are renowned for their goldsmithing. Learn how their ceremonial masks reflect a powerful royal tradition.
The Ashanti people of Ghana are renowned for their goldsmithing. Learn how their ceremonial masks reflect a powerful royal tradition.
Isolation shapes art in ways that are easy to underestimate until you meet a tradition it happened to. The Mumuye, living in the rocky hills and savannas of northeastern Nigeria along the bend of the Benue River, remained in near total isolation until as recently as 1959, and their statuary was not even discovered by…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masking traditions on this site are built around one recurring event: an initiation, a funeral, an installation of a chief. Lwalwa masking is built around a recurring failure. When hunters came home from…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → The Kwele mask is easy to recognize and hard to forget. A pale, heart shaped face. A triangular nose. Eyes closed or nearly closed, like someone deep in thought rather than deep in performance….
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Attribution in Central African art history is rarely as tidy as a museum label makes it look, and the Binji are one of the clearest examples of that on this site. Their carvers produced…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions documented in this book tie their objects to ancestors, initiation, or entertainment. The Mambila, farmers and stockbreeders straddling the Cameroon–Nigeria border, built theirs around something more specific: an association called suaga,…