Category: tribal

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, “Untitled (Yam Story)”, 1972, Acrylic on Board, 65 x 44 cm, Private Collection 

Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, “Tingari”, 1988, Acrylic on Belgian Linen, 121 x 180 cm, Private Collection

Born at Marnpi located in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1926, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri is one of the most important painters to emerge from Australia’s Western Desert. He was one of the foundation members of the art movement that emerged in Papunya Tula. While many of his peers painted according to stylized conventions, Namarari’s work is distinguished by an extraordinary range of visual inventions.

As a boy, Namrari was taken by his parents on traditional travels throughout the local area, including north to Nyunmanu, a major dingo dreaming site, south to Lake Neal,  and northwest to the Warnman Rocks and Warhungurru, a remote settlement in the Kintore Range of the Northern Territory. Following the murder of his father by a Aboriginal avenger group and his mother’s resulting suicide by fire, Namarari, along with his sister, fled the desert and traveled east to the safety of the Lutheran Hermannsburg Mission. 

In 1932, Namarari had his first associations with Australians of European background and began to attend the Hermannsburg Mission School. While attending the school, he became acquainted with the work of Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira and his fellow Western Aranda landscape painters. At the age of eleven, Namarari began stock work for cattleman Billy MacNamara at a cattle station located near the early settlement of Areyonga, where he later became initiated in a ceremony that signified his manhood. With the establishment of cattle stations at Haasts Bluff in the 1950s and, later, at Papunya in the 1960s, Namarari and his wife, Elizabeth Nakamarra Marks,  eventually moved closer to their traditional country; they would later have one daughter, Angeline Nungurrayl.  

In 1971 encouraged by Geoff Bardon, one of the founding members of the Papunya Tula Artists, Namarari, at the age of forty-five, began painting at Papunya. His early works have a bare background of a single color, most often black or rich red-brown, with most depictions related to Aboriginal Dreaming stories of the Moon. Namarari explored figuration in this early work, in which he gave equal emphasis to both the depictions of ceremonial performers and the details of the ceremonial ground with its associated sacred objects. He also created hypnotic depictions of his birthplace, Marnpi, in which he used white pulsing lines to draw the viewer’s eye into the ancestral wind’s vortex generated at the site.

Namarari’s typical work of the 1980s were gracefully controlled renditions of the classical Tingari design of linked concentric circles, which was one of that period’s keystones of Western Desert iconography. Using such tradition patterns, he developed a image series of red and white triangular and rectangular forms. By the late 1990s, Namarari was creating works often using white and yellow paint stipples applied with his fingertips. Because of the unusually large range of totemic sites for which he held responsibilities, Namarari’s later works varied widely in their depictions and in their artistic styles. In addition to the Dreaming stories of the Moon, he painted Dingo, Wind, Kangaroo, Mallee-fowl, Crow, Tingari Men, Hopping Mouse, and Bandicoot Dreamings.

In 1981, Namarari, along with two other senior Pintupi artists, were invited, at the request of former Papunya-associated people, to paint and show their work at an exhibition in Sydney. Namarari was awarded the National Aboriginal Art Award in 1991 and, in 1994, was a co-winner of the Alice Prize and became the inaugural recipient of the Australia Council’s prestigious Red Ochre Award for lifetime achievement. He became the only artist to receive all three awards. Throughout his creative artistic career of over twenty-five years, Namarari remained a loyal member of the Papunya Tula Artists Company, despite numerous offers of representation from local and national galleries. 

A reserved man and patient teacher, Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri died in Alice Springs in August of 1998, at the age of seventy two, and left a legacy of over seven hundred paintings that illustrate his inventiveness and the cultural richness of his heritage. His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, as well as in many private collections.

Top Insert Painting: Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Tingari Cycle, 1984, Acrylic on Canvas, 55 x 70 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Painting: Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri, Children’s Dreaming with Many Body Paint Variations, circa 1972-1973, Papunya Community School Collection

Gary Lee

Photographs and Illustration by Gary Lee

Gary Lee is a Larrakia artist, born in 1952 and raised in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, Australia. An anthropologist, artist, writer and curator, Lee has been an active participant in and promoter of Aboriginal arts since the early 1980s.

Prior to his studies at Sydney College of the Arts, Gary Lee worked alongside Andrew Trewin to produce a line of evening and cocktail wear, incorporating Lee’s Aboriginal designs and sold under the Trewin Lee label. Lee attended a year at Sydney College majoring in glass and painting, but left to pursue a career in fashion design. After a few years in Sydney, Lee returned to the Northern Territory where he began working as a trainee Aboriginal arts advisor with Chips MacKinolty at Mimi Arts and Crafts in Katherine.

This move brought Gary Lee in contact with a wide range of Aboriginal artists and led to his curating a series of shows of Aboriginal crafts and art. Working at Mimi Arts inspired him to undertake studies, firstly as a Cultural Heritage Management student at Canberra’s College of Advanced Education and later at the Australian National University, earning a BA with Honors in Anthropology. Lee also undertook internships at the National Gallery of Australia, becoming its first Aboriginal intern, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. 

After five years of study and employment as a project manager for the Australia Council for the Arts, Gary Lee returned to his homeland as a Larrakia anthropologist in a research position at the Northern Land Council. During this time, he wrote a musical play based on his maternal heritage entitled “Keep Him in My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story”, which premiered in Darwin and showcased Lee’s skills as writer and fashion designer.  

In 1993, Gary Lee began working in the field of photography with his series “Nice Colored Boys”, an allusion to Australian film maker Tracey Moffatt’s classic short film “Nice Colored Girls”. It began as a project to reconnect Lee with the regions of Nepal and India, where he traveled in the 1970s. The film was designed to celebrate the physicality of the men in the area, to subvert Western male beauty stereotypes, and to explore nuances of Aboriginal art and identity.

In 1998, Lee’s street photography, portrait series “Bablu, Milk Boy” was published in Australia’s oldest and most respected photography magazine, Photofile. At the suggestion of Photofile editor Alasdair Forster, Lee produced the “Skin” series, placing himself in the frame alongside men from Nepal and India. Photographs from this series were later shown in the 2008 “More Than My Skin” exhibition, which focused on Aboriginal male photographers, at the Campbelltown Arts Center.

Beginning in 2005, Gary Lee’s photography came to reflect a combination of contemporary and historical Larrakia subjects. The catalyst for this was partly his involvement as co-curator in an exhibition celebrating Billiamook, who was a key Larrakia figure in the region’s contact history. In this exhibition Lee displayed a portrait of his nephew, Shannon, alongside a portrait of Billiamook by the colonial photographer Paul Foelsche, in which both sixteen year old boys exude physical prowess.

Lee’s venture into portraits incorporating his own family paralleled his work into other Aboriginal portraits, becoming an extension of his “Nice Colored Boys” series. To some extent, he had already been doing this as a way of documenting Aboriginal gay and transgender communities. From 2004, however, he began a discrete, ongoing series called “Nymgololo”, a Larrakia word for young man or bachelor,  which focused on Aboriginal men in Darwin. 

In October 2007, Gary Lee was in Canberra for the opening of the “Culture Warriors” exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia when he suffered a life-threatening stroke. While undergoing extensive rehabilitation in 2008, Lee experienced his busiest period of exhibition commitments including his very first solo exhibition, “Maast Maast”, at Darwin’s 24HR Art NT Centre for Contemporary Art. This exhibition was largely a selection of past work from the “Nice Colored Boys”, “Skin” and “Nymgolofo” series.

Gary Lee’s work has been published in books, art journals and magazines in Australia and abroad. His work can be seen in many major collections including: the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin; and the art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Note: A book of note is author Dino Hodge’s “Did You Meet Any Malagas (Men)”: A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital”, published in 1993. It is a collection of oral histories intended to tell a gay history of the Larrakia territory, recognizing local issues of sexuality, gender, colonialism, and race. It should be noted that Hodges’ friend Gary Lee was the first indigenous person to collaborate with the Northern Territory AIDS Council.

Calendar: March 16

Year: Day to Day Men; March 16

The Darkness of the Night

The sixteenth of March in 1621 marks the day Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore, made contact with the Pilgrims of the recently established Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English colony in New England. 

Samoset was a sagamore, or subordinate chief, of an Eastern Abenaki tribe that resided in Maine. The Abenaki, ‘People of the Dawn Land’, are indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. The are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of the five principal Eastern Algonquian Nations. 

Samoset had learned some English from visiting an earlier settled fishing camp in the Gulf of Maine; English fishermen would fish cod off the coast of Mohegan Island. In March of 1621, Samoset was visiting Massasoit, the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy. Massasoit’s people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narragansetts, the most powerful tribe in the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620. Massasoit Sachem sought an alliance with the Plymouth colonists as a way to protect his people.

On Friday, the sixteenth of March in 1621, Samoset entered the settlement at Plymouth alone and greeted the colonists in English. He was the first indigenous person with whom the colonists could converse. Samoset told the colonists about the land, the sagamores, and his people’s strength and numbers. He was also acquainted with many of the captains and fishermen who visited the colony. Samoset and the colonists communicated and, in the evening, lodged at colonist Stephen Hopkin’s house. 

The next morning, the Plymouth colonists gave Samoset a knife, bracelet and a ring before he left with a promise to return. On the twenty-second of March, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, the last known member of the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe. Squanto, who spoke a greater degree of English, arranged a meeting between the leaders of the colonists and Massasoit.   

Massasoit forged critical personal and political ties with colonial leaders William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, John Carver and Myles Standish, which grew from the peace treaty negotiated on the twenty-second of March in 1621. The alliance assured the neutrality of the Wampanoag Confederacy during the 1636 Pequot War. 

Notes: In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge. Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.

English Sea Captain Christopher Levett entertained Samoset and other tribal leaders in 1624 onboard his ship at harbor in Portland, Maine. Samoset is believed to have died circa 1653 in Pemaquid, Maine.

Calendar: January 31

Year: Day to Day Men: January 31

Stereoscopic Viewing

On January 31st in 1800, one of the earliest Native American literary writers, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, was born in Sault Ste. Marie located in the upper peninsula of the present state of Michigan. She was of Scottish-Irish and Ojibwe ancestry, born to John Johnston, a fur trader, and Ozhaguscodaywayquay, the daughter of Waubojeeg, a prominent Ojibwe war chief. Her parents were historically famous leaders in both the Ojibwe and Euro-American communities. 

Jane Johnson Schoolcraft was fluent in the language and learned of both the English and Ojibwe cultures, which offered her a unique perspective for her creative work. She wrote poetry and traditional Ojibwe stores and translated many Ojibwe songs into English. Schoolcraft mostly wrote in English but published some poems in the Ojibwe language. 

In her early twenties, Jane Johnston met Henry Schoolcraft, an American ethnologist and geographer who was conducting an expedition in the territory of present-day Michigan. They married in 1822 and began a relationship that proved significant for both of them. The marriage offered Jane a means to express her own literary talents; she also provided Henry insights on Ojibwe culture and language that aided his ethnological work. 

Jane Schoolcraft’s poetry and translated Obijwe stories made noteworthy contributions to American literature. Her work is one of the earliest examples of Native American literature published in the United States. Schoolcraft’s influence is evident in many of the stories that Henry Schoolcraft collected; her translations and insights aided him in his later role as a government agent for Native Americans.

In 1826 and 1827, Schoolcraft’s writings were published in a handwritten magazine entitled “The Literary Voyager”, produced by Henry Schoolcraft. These issues were distributed widely to residents of Sault Ste. Marie as well as people in New York, Detroit and other cities. Her work also appeared in a six-volume study known as “Indian Tribes of the United States” that was commissioned in 1846 by the United States Congress. 

In 1841, Henry and Jane Schoolcraft moved to New York City where Henry was employed by the state of New York to research Native American culture. After having suffered several illnesses, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died at the age of forty-two in May of 1842 while visiting her married sister in Canada. She was buried at St. John’s Anglican Church in present-day Ancaster, Ontario. Schoolcraft is recognized as the first Native American literary writer, both as a woman and a poet, as well as the first to write out traditional Native American stories.

Notes: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe name was Bamewawagezhikaquay, the literary translation means “Woman of the Sound (that the stars make) Rushing Through the Sky”. Her writings began to attract interest in the 1990s as work by minority communities began to be more widely studied. In 2008, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan’s Women’s Hall of Fame. 

Yoruba Ere Ibeji Figures

Yoruba Ere Ibeji Figures

The Yoruba have one of the highest rates of twining in the world. It is estimated that out of every 1,000 births, 45-50 result in twins. Twins are revered among the Yoruba and come into this world with the protection of the orisha deity named Shango who is evoked at the baby’s naming ceremony when he or she is a few months old.

Due to the low birth weight of twins and the high infant mortality rates in Nigeria, many twin babies do not live long. If a baby dies during childbirth, in the months leading up to the naming ceremony, the parents will seek consultation with an Ifá diviner, a Babalawo. If the Babalawo ascertains a spiritual cause, he will help the parents find a carver to create an Ere ibeji figure.

An Ere ibeji is a wooden carving of a male or female figure once used by the Yoruba. The figure is thought to be a focal point for the spiritual energy of the deceased twin who, according to Yoruba traditional thought, resides in the supernatural realm where he/she is cared for by a spiritual mother.

Calendar: January 8

Year: Day to Day Men: January 8

Man on Deck

The eighth of January in 1877 marks the Battle of Wolf Mountain, known by the Northern Cheyenne as the Battle of Belly Butte, a confrontation between the United States Army and warriors from both the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. Occurring during the Great Sioux War of 1876, the battle was fought in southern Montana Territory near the Tongue River.

Following Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s defeat in the Battle of Little Bighorn, a large number of Army reinforcements were sent by the government into the Montana Territory. In autumn of 1876, a few bands of Sioux and Cheyenne tribes were returning to the reservations and agencies, now managed by the army instead of civilian contractors, to acquire food and annuity goods for the winter. These provisions had been promised to the tribes after the government demanded that they cede the Black Hills area to it. 

By December, General Nelsen Miles had led a mixed force of infantry, artillery and calvary after Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull’s band and effectively defeated them. Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie defeated the Northern Cheyenne under Chief Morning Star after a destructive raid, known as the Dull Knife Fight, that left two hundred lodges destroyed, seven hundred livestock captured, and most of the Cheyenne forced to surrender. The surviving warriors trekked through snow and icy conditions to join the camp of Chief Crazy Horse in the Tongue River Valley. 

Concerned about the approaching winter and the situation of the remaining Cheyenne band, Chief Crazy Horse decided to negotiate a peace with the army. However, a group of United States Army Crow scouts murdered Crazy Horse’s delegation. In retaliation, a series of small raids by the Cheyenne tried to draw out Colonel Nelson Miles’s troops from the Tongue River army post. In December of 1876, Miles led most of nine companies from the army post in pursuit of Crazy Horse at Tongue River Valley. On the seventh of January, Miles captured a few Northern Cheyennes and camped with a force of four hundred-thirty six men along the Tongue River. That night fresh snow fell and the temperatures dropped.

After early morning shots were fired. Colonel Miles set up a defensive perimeter along a ridge on the knoll later called Battle Butte. The defensive position had two pieces of artillery beside it and a clear line of fire in front. At seven in the morning, Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Chief Two Moon began a series of attacks. Due the the army’s firepower, the warriors had to regroup and attack several times; however, these attacks failed when Miles shifted his reserves. Miles’s Fifth Infantry units struggled to take the hills occupied by the warriors; despite the deep snow, the units secured seven of the hills, forcing the Sioux and Cheyenne to withdraw. 

Although a draw in many aspects, the Battle of Wolf Mountain was a strategic victory for the U.S. Army as the Sioux and Cheyenne saw they were not safe from the army even in winter’s harsh conditions. Many members of the tribes returned to the reservations. By May of 1877, Chief Crazy Horse had led his surviving band to Camp Robinson to surrender.

Notes: Chief Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band; his Lakota name was Tȟašúŋke Witkó, literal translation “His Horse is Crazy”. After his surrender, he resided in his village near the Red Cloud Agency, located by Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Crazy Horse had promised he would remain in peace with the army. Due to mistranslation by an Indian interpreter, the army felt that he was a threat and eventually arrested and placed in the guardhouse. Once inside, Crazy Horse attempted to escape and was stabbed with a bayonet by one of the guards. He was tended by the assistant post surgeon but died late on the night of September fifth in 1877. The identification of the guard remains questioned. Crazy Horse’s remains were handed over to his elderly parents; his final resting place remains unknown.

Chief Morning Star was a great chief of the Northern Cheyenne people and the headchief of the Notameohmésêhese band on the northern Great Plains. Known also as Chief Dull Knife, his Lakota Sioux name was Tȟamílapȟéšni. He died in 1883 and is interred at Lame Deer Cemetery on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in  southeastern Montana.

Phyllis Galembo

Phyllis Galembo, Masks Series

Phyllis Galembo was born in New York and lives in New York City.  She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1977 and has been a professor in the Fine Arts Department of SUNY Albany since 1978.

Galembo has made over twenty trips to sites of ritual masquerade in Africa and the Caribbean, capturing cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Her impressive body of photographs depicts the physical character, costumes, and rituals of African religious practices and their diasporic manifestations in the Caribbean and South America. Masking is a complex, mysterious and profound tradition in which the participants transcend the physical world and enter the spiritual realm. In her vibrant images, Galembo exposes an ornate code of political, artistic, theatrical, social, and religious symbolism and commentary.

Using a direct, unaffected portrait style, Galembo captures her subjects informally posed but often strikingly attired in traditional or ritualistic dress. Attuned to a moment’s collision of past, present and future, Galembo finds the timeless elegance and dignity of her subjects. Galembo’s portraiture illuminates the transformative power of costume and ritual.

She highlights the creativity of the individuals morphing into a fantastical representation of themselves, having cobbled together materials gathered from the immediate environment to idealize their vision of mythical figures. Her images capture the raw and often frightening aspect of ceremonial garb. While still pronounced in their personal identity, the subject’s intentions are rooted in the larger dynamics of religious, political and cultural affiliation. Establishing these connections is a hallmark of Galembo’s work.

Russ Kruse

Native American Art by Russ Kruse

Russ Keck was born in Orange, Texas, and was adopted by the Kruse family when he was three years old. As a child, Russ was introduced to the Native American culture by his uncle, who kept cases full of arrowheads that he’d found on his land and nearby. This sparked his interest in Native American culture and he soon began to create bows and arrows. Seeing his interest in handcrafting objects, his adoptive father, a carpenter, taught him how to work with wood. Russ then taught himself to carve animals out of pieces of Ash, Mesquite, Birch, and Maple trees.

He began to research the origins of his biological family and discovered that he was descended from the Cherokee people. Finally having his suspicions proven right about the naturalness of his art, Russ then realized that creating this art was his heritage and his life’s calling.

Russ has sold his art to galleries, trading posts, and Native American shops in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, and New York.  In addition, he sells to collectors all over the United States, in Finland, and other European countries.

Nepcetat Mask

Central Yup’ik, Nepcetat Mask, Arctic Region, 1840-60. Wood, Swan Feathers, Snowy-Owl Feathers, Fox Teeth, Sealskin, Thong, Reed, Blood, Pigment, Ochre, Charcoal: Fenimore Museum, Cooperstown, New York

In all the classes of masks, the nepcetat or nepcetaq mask is ranked highest, being the most powerful mask. Each mask could only be used by its owner, and another person could not just take it and use it as effectively. Although the angalkuq or shaman would place the mask on his face without a string to hold it there, it would adhere to his face and not fall off even though he would bow down.

Deer Head Mask

The Deer Head Mask Of Mexico

Fanciful headdresses were an essential component of performance costumes because they were crucial to the dancers’ perceived transformation into the personage or spirit being in whose guise they performed. In Veracruz, figurines depicting warriors and a wide variety of performers often wear full-head masks, which can be removed to reveal the person inside, such as the amazingly detailed head-mask of a deer.

Post-fire paint adorns the animal, with black-line curvilinear motifs on his long ear and bright blue-green pigment embellishing his upper lip. Large protuberances on his snout and the single horn atop his head suggest a composite zoomorph rather than a biologically accurate rendering.

The deer was an important Mesoamerican food source, and its hide was used for a variety of purposes including the wrapping of ritual bundles and as leaves (pages) for screen-fold manuscripts which contained all manner of knowledge-from history to religious mythology to astrology and astronomy. The deer also was the animal spirit form of the mother of the seminal Mexican deity Quetzalcoatl and of the wife of the maize god among the Classic Maya.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Six Paintings by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, of Coast Salish descent, graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in British Columbia. In combining his own experiences with a political perspective, he paints landscapes with vivid, acidic colours, merging Native iconography with a surrealist influence to address West Coast Native issues.

Yuxweluptun is Salish for “man of many masks,” a name given to the artist during his initiation into the Sxwaixwe Society at the age of fourteen. It is Cowishan Salish belief that the Sxwaixwe is a supernatural being who came down from the sky to live at the bottom of a lake. There is a dance associated with this creature in which the mask plays an important role. Yuxweluptun explains, “You carry the mask that belongs to your family and you identify with the animal on the mask.” (Robin Laurence, “Man of Masks,” Canadian Art, Spring 1995).

Yuxweluptun has chosen art as a way to voice his political concerns, exposing environmental destruction and the struggle of Native people. He believes that his artwork stimulates dialogue between Native and non-Native people.

Bakongo Nkondi Nail Fetish

Magical Objects: Africa: Congo Region: Bakongo Nkondi Nail Fetish

The various attempts to influence the fearsome powers of the supernatural through the mediation of statues or fetishes have acquired particular intensity in the regions round the mouth of the River Congo, home of the Kongo, Yombe and Vili tribes, and this is also the case in the east of Zaire, among the Songye.

Magical objects were for many years little known in Europe, as Christian missionaries working in Africa tracked them down and had them burnt. Certain statues which were brought back to Europe by religious men, allegedly for documentation, were kept in secret and could not be studied. They were much feared for they seemed, even to European eyes, to have real power, a belief almost universally accepted in 17th-century Europe. Olfert Dapper was the first to look dispassionately at these “fetish” objects and to dare to describe them.

Recent work has led to a better understanding. They are wooden carvings, either anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, which are covered with a variety of objects such as nails or metal blades. The cavities in their back or stomach contain “medicines” – grains, hairs, teeth or fingernails – which are held together with various binding materials. Pieces of fabric, feathers or lumps of clay are sometimes present. Finally, bits of mirror, shiny metal or shells are used to close the cavities or to mark the eyes.

Very often the faces alone are carved in detail, while the rest of the body – destined to be hidden under these various additional features – is sculpted more summarily. The figure’s genitals may even be missing, either because they have never been carved or because they have been removed by a zealous missionary.