Antique and Vintage Masks

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Strictly speaking, masks are designed to hide the faces of the people who wear them. But masks themselves are also faces presented to the world, the alter-egos of their wearers as well as windows into the societies that made them. In this way,...
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Strictly speaking, masks are designed to hide the faces of the people who wear them. But masks themselves are also faces presented to the world, the alter-egos of their wearers as well as windows into the societies that made them. In this way, masks conceal while exposing, obfuscate while revealing, camouflage while laying bare. Those who gravitate toward such ineffable examples of fine art, though, are generally guided by geography rather than lofty sounding metaphysical conceits. Many seek out the wooden tribal masks of Africa, which were popularized in the Western world by artists such as Pablo Picasso. Others favor the raffia and sea-shell decorated masks of Oceania, the bug-eyed head coverings worn in parts of Indonesia, or the totemistic constructions engineered by indigenous peoples along 1,000 miles of North America’s Pacific coast, from the Columbia River, which defines the Washington-Oregon border, to Yakutat Bay, Alaska, which is less than a day’s hike from the southwestern edge of Canada’s Yukon territory. African masks are usually divided into those from West Africa (including present-day Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone) and equatorial Africa (primarily present-day Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was known throughout much of the 20th century as Zaire). Historic masks from these areas that are bought and sold at prestigious auction houses are identified by both their country of origin and the tribe that made them. For example, the Dogon of central Mali were famous for their boxy antelope masks, as well as the Dama masks worn during rituals for departed ancestors. The Bambara, also from Mali, are known for their antelope headdresses called chi wara, which can be decoded to further identify their source based on their shapes and orientation (vertical or horizontal). Other ceremonies associated with African masks are initiation rites, for which the Bijugo of the Bissagos Islands off the coast of...
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