Robert Goldwater Library blog

King Island Mask Returned to Ghost Village

King Island Shaman's Mask at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum. Photo: Laura Samuelson / AP file. The King Island Shaman's Mask, which was returned to Alaska by Marilyn Lewis of Port Townsend, Wash. A Lewis relative took the ancient mask from Alaska more than a century ago and she wanted to get it back to its rightful owners.

via msnbc.com [thanks Nicole!]:

Ancient mask returned to Alaska ghost village
Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island gets sacred surprise
By Rachel D'Oro, Associated Press
Fri., Jan. 18, 2008

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former inhabitants and their descendants, its crumbling homes still perched on stilts, clinging to the steep, rocky terrain.

Until recently, little else remained of the island, an Inupiat Eskimo village, except for traditions, memories and artifacts scattered at museums around the nation. Then came word from a stranger nearly 2,000 miles away who said she possessed an ancient mask a relative brought back from Alaska more than a century ago.

On the back of the relic was a faint inscription: "Taken from a medicine man's grave on King Island."

The woman from northwest Washington e-mailed Charlene Saclamana, tribal coordinator with the King Island Native Community based in Nome, a city 80 miles southeast of the tiny Bering Sea island where many of its residents relocated.

Marilyn Lewis said she wanted to return the wooden mask to its rightful owners. Two weeks later, she traveled to Alaska to deliver the artifact, which is now on display at the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, named after the museum's late founder, a gold rush pioneer.

"It gives me and my family something tangible from our past. We've lost so much of the culture," said Saclamana, whose parents lived on King Island. "We were eager to have the mask back in our possession. We never had anything that well preserved from the island."

The island, home to about 200 people a century ago, was abandoned for various reasons. [read on...]

Photo: Capt. Budd Christman / NOAA Corps via AP. The deserted stilt village of King Island, Alaska, about 625 miles northwest of Anchorage, is shown in 1978. Four decades after it was abandoned, King Island holds an almost mystical pull for former residents and their offspring, its crumbling homes still perched eerily on stilts across the steep, rocky face of an unforgiving terrain.

Mish-Mask

A still from Yinka Shonibare’s “Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball)” (2004) {See Slide Show}

via NYTimes:

Art Review | 'Mask'
Face Time: Masks, Animal to Video
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: January 11, 2008

The mask is one of the most basic and recognizable of all forms, and for good reason. One way early humans made sense of the universe was to personify its forces, and the most visible form of personification was the face. Masks have long been central to religious rituals, serving as tools of transformation and bridges to the spirit world. They have figured in ceremonies intended to ensure fertility and raise the dead, make crops grow and rain fall, kill enemies, ward off evil and cure sickness. They have been used by soldiers and celebrators of Lent, astronauts and action heroes, hockey players and fencers, firefighters and welders.

The ubiquity of the mask, regardless of time, place or purpose, is the impetus behind “Mask,” a sprawling show at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea. Subtitled “an exhibition of historic masks and contemporary works curated in collaboration with Joseph G. Gerena Fine Art,” this gathering of more than 40 masks and hoods, and more than 30 works in sculpture, video and photography, is a mishmash of cultures and functions in which old and older tend to dominate. This can mean an American firefighter’s goofy-looking smoke hood from around 1900; a carved and painted wood exorcism mask from 19th-century Sri Lanka; or a terra-cotta jaguar/man mask from Ecuador (700-300 B.C).

These and about 40 other masks from sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, premodern Europe, turn-of-the-century America and several parts of Asia do most of the showstopping here. All were provided by Mr. Gerena, a private dealer who seems to have an excellent eye and, along with Mr. Cohan and his staff, has orchestrated an installation full of interesting cross-references and juxtapositions.

The show is also commendable for not being loaded with the gallery’s artists; only 4 of the 32 contemporary works here are from Team Cohan. This includes the opening salvo, a riveting video by Yinka Shonibare that may be one of the best things he has ever done. It shows a highly stylized masked ball in which the guests wear 18th-century garments made from Mr. Shonibare’s distinctive Euro-African fabrics, which is not new for him. But in this case he has used a combination of sound and movement to strip a minuetlike dance down to a tribal, almost animalistic ritual while still leaving its mannered veneer intact.

Beside the door to the video gallery there is an Oddfellows hoodwink from early-20th-century America. A small, neat variation on the masks seen in Mr. Shonibare’s video, it combines a leather eye mask and eyeglasses. It looks like something Amelia Earhart might have worn, except that the eyeglass lenses have little hinged covers that were raised and lowered as the Freemasons’ initiation rites progressed.

In the main gallery there is a lively interchange among historic masks from different cultures, with intermittent input from contemporary works. First, a row of seven masks confounds expectations. An 18th- to 19th-century skull mask from the Tibetan Sherdukpen people of northern India seems made to order for a Mexican Day of the Dead festival, while what looks like an African monkey mask is actually from Nepal.

The show emphasizes these transcultural twists and turns. [read on...]

A Century of Makonde @ The Wallach Gallery, reviewed in The NYTimes

Wallach Gallery. Figures of Makonde men, around 1970-80, one carrying a boy and a suitcase, the other a water pipe and a spear.

via NYTimes, Art In Review [additional linkage provided by RGL]:

REVOLUTIONS
A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 2, 2007

Wallach Art Gallery
Columbia University
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, near 116th Street, Morningside Heights

Through Dec. 8

Goodbye to timeless Africa, darkest Africa, out-of-Africa and the "primitive" Africa that made Western Modernism sexy — to all the blinding stereotypes that shape the way Africa continues to be viewed internationally. Such farewells form the very basis of African art history as a progressive discipline today. And they clearly underlie exhibitions like this one, organized by Alexander Ives Bortolot, a lecturer in African art history at Dartmouth College and a Columbia University doctoral candidate.

Art from Mozambique, and East Africa in general, is scantily represented in public collections, and the art of the Makonde people has been little studied in recent years. So Mr. Bortolot is filling a scholarly need. And he approaches his subject in an interesting way, not through objects per se, but through the masked performance tradition called mapiko in which they play an integral role.

The show begins with 19th- and early-20th-century sculptures that suggest the roots of the masquerades performed by masked and costumed Makonde men — participation by women was forbidden — who assumed the personas of ancestral spirits who protected and preserved order in the community. Beginning in the 1920s, its spiritual utility diminished, but its role as inventive social commentary increased. When a socialist government came to power after independence in 1964, the masquerade became a vehicle for a new ethic of self-reliance and social equality. Women began participating and created masquerades of their own.

Now, after a protracted civil war and the establishment of multiparty democracy, the mapiko tradition is thriving in freestyle mode. Some performers present it as pure entertainment, others as social critique, still others as a way to restore old spiritual meanings. In every case this is a transformative art at the center of society, not a luxury item at its fringes. It encompasses ideas of repetition and change, and Western art can learn from it.

Mr. Bortolot captures all of this thrillingly. And Wallach, in presenting the show, does exactly what a university gallery should so. It showcases fresh research; fleshes out that research with marvelous and unfamiliar objects; and distills it in a catalog of nuanced clarity, written by the curator. Congratulations all around.

REVOLUTIONS
A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 2, 2007

Wallach Art Gallery 
Columbia University
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, near 116th Street, Morningside Heights

Wallach Gallery. Figures of Makonde men, around 1970-80, one carrying a boy and a suitcase, the other a water pipe and a spear.

via NYTimes, Art In Review [additional linkage provided by RGL]:

REVOLUTIONS
A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 2, 2007

Wallach Art Gallery
Columbia University
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, near 116th Street, Morningside Heights

Through Dec. 8

Goodbye to timeless Africa, darkest Africa, out-of-Africa and the "primitive" Africa that made Western Modernism sexy — to all the blinding stereotypes that shape the way Africa continues to be viewed internationally. Such farewells form the very basis of African art history as a progressive discipline today. And they clearly underlie exhibitions like this one, organized by Alexander Ives Bortolot, a lecturer in African art history at Dartmouth College and a Columbia University doctoral candidate.

Art from Mozambique, and East Africa in general, is scantily represented in public collections, and the art of the Makonde people has been little studied in recent years. So Mr. Bortolot is filling a scholarly need. And he approaches his subject in an interesting way, not through objects per se, but through the masked performance tradition called mapiko in which they play an integral role.

The show begins with 19th- and early-20th-century sculptures that suggest the roots of the masquerades performed by masked and costumed Makonde men — participation by women was forbidden — who assumed the personas of ancestral spirits who protected and preserved order in the community. Beginning in the 1920s, its spiritual utility diminished, but its role as inventive social commentary increased. When a socialist government came to power after independence in 1964, the masquerade became a vehicle for a new ethic of self-reliance and social equality. Women began participating and created masquerades of their own.

Now, after a protracted civil war and the establishment of multiparty democracy, the mapiko tradition is thriving in freestyle mode. Some performers present it as pure entertainment, others as social critique, still others as a way to restore old spiritual meanings. In every case this is a transformative art at the center of society, not a luxury item at its fringes. It encompasses ideas of repetition and change, and Western art can learn from it.

Mr. Bortolot captures all of this thrillingly. And Wallach, in presenting the show, does exactly what a university gallery should so. It showcases fresh research; fleshes out that research with marvelous and unfamiliar objects; and distills it in a catalog of nuanced clarity, written by the curator. Congratulations all around.

REVOLUTIONS
A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique
By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: November 2, 2007

Wallach Art Gallery 
Columbia University
1190 Amsterdam Avenue, near 116th Street, Morningside Heights