MASKS, MAGIC & MEANING

The month of October celebrates the harvest and gives thanks to the ancestral spirits for their continued protection. We honor this tradition every year with our special collection and showing of African masks of the Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana, Congo, and Nigeria.

Each collection is carefully selected and curated and each galleries’ collection is separate and unique. So come into a gallery location or into our web gallery and explore the realm of the ancestral spirit masks!

The Magic

Most do not feel the power, the magic, of the mask until seen against a roaring bonfire, in a wildly animated dance to pounding drums. The full regalia and movement brings the power of the mask alive. The rhythm of the dance and drums enhance the rhythmical patterns, contours and ridges of the wooden masks.

The sacred, the ritual, the spiritual: this is the poetic language of the mask. It is a language of complex mythological stories, rich traditions and historic legends. These traditions were not written but remembered and acted, each time differently. The stories, mask designs, costumes and dances pass through the generations as cultural treasures.

The Meaning

African masks are used in different situations both in intimate rituals and for public ceremonies. The masks imbue purposes for fertility, initiation into adulthood, and honoring of mythological, ancestral heroes or animal spirits. They are not demonic spirits as contrived and projected by ignorant and superstitious turn-of-the-century western sensibilities. Instead, these sacred masks represent important spirits of protection and procreation. The exaggeration of a mask's features gives greater emphasis, drama and power to the spirits presence.

For a mask to represent a supernatural force, it needs to appear ethereal. It is this exuberant exaggeration that stunned Pablo Picasso. It was an African mask that caught Pablo Picasso's attention at a party. He sat, not talking to anyone, turning the mask over and over again in his hands, thinking of the troubled portraiture he had been trying to paint of Gertrude Stein. Within the week he had a rough painting of her with the first influence of an African mask.

"I have felt my strongest artistic emotions when suddenly confronted with the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa. These works of a religious, passionate and rigorously logistical art are the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced." - Pablo Picasso