Headdress

In these two works, one encounters many of the research challenges found in some African artworks in American museums.  Collected in West Africa during the colonial era, they arrived at the Davis with incomplete and incorrect information about their origins, meanings, and purposes. While sharing characteristics with Igbo and Ibibio arts, they are also unique, making it difficult to attribute them to a certain artist, community, or culture by visual analysis alone. The Janus-faced headdress gazes in two directions with bright reflective eyes, while atop his head, a man sits astride what might be a bicycle. Detached from its ensemble and lacking a dancer, it remains silent regarding what impact it had on the world through a vibrant masquerade. The small sculpture, perhaps a shrine figure, stands erect—although the information we have inherited from older art historical approaches cannot tell us in whose honor he was made.