Oct

Art unmasking history

The largest tributary of the Niger River, the 650-mile-long Benue River, runs through the center of Nigeria. The National Museum of African Art is presenting a comprehensive view of the arts of the region in “Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley,” through March 4, 2012. The exhibition includes some of the most abstract, dramatic and inventive sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa.

More than 25 ethnic groups live along the Benue, and their artworks in wood, ceramic and metal hold meanings and have purposes crucial to the people of Benue Valley as they have confronted and resolved life’s challenges.

The exhibition features more than 148 objects used in a range of ritual contexts, with genres as varied and complex as the vast region itself, including maternal images, sleek columnar statues, helmet masks adorned with naturalistic human faces, horizontal masks designed as stylized animal-human fusions, imaginative anthropomorphic ceramic vessels and elaborate regalia forged in iron and cast in copper alloys.

The exhibition “unmasks” the history of central Nigeria through the dynamic interrelationships of its peoples and their arts.

This large elephant mask (Itrokwu) is a metaphor for greatness and for the chief’s potential for destructive power. Also pictured is an indigo burial cloth, worn as a kind of cloak over other layers of cloth to increase its size. (Elephant Mask (Itrokwu) Idoma/Akweya people, Otobi village. Circa 1944; Musée du quai Branly, Paris)