New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most African masking traditions center on a single dominant mask type. Goli, performed by the Baule people of central Ivory Coast, is built differently: it is a sequence of paired masks, performed in order…
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 → Some African masks were inherited with a family name. A Salampasu mask was not one of them. To wear one, a man had to do something first: perform a specific deed, pay in livestock…
The striped Kifwebe mask of the Luba and Songye peoples is one of the most visually distinctive in all of African art. Here is the story behind the design.