Tag: masks

Tlingit Eagle Mask

Tlingit Eagle Mask, Rietberg Museum, Zurich, Switzerland

The Tlingit kinship system, like most Northwest Coast societies, is based on a matrilineal structure, and describes a family roughly according to Morgan’s Crow system of kinship. The society is wholly divided into two distinct functional kinship groups, termed Raven (Yéil) and Eagle/Wolf (Ch’aak’/Ghooch). The former identifies with the raven as its primary crest, but the latter is variously identified with the wolf, the eagle, or some other dominant animal crest depending on location of the families.

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.

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.

Richard Brautigan: “He Started Crying When He Saw the Ferris Wheel”

Photographer Unknown, (Carnival)

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.”

― Richard Brautigan, A Boat

Collection: Wooden Masks of the World

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Collection of Wooden Masks of the World

Masks in various forms (sacred, practical, or playful) have played a crucial historical role in the development of understandings about “what it means to be human”, because they permit the imaginative experience of “what it is like” to be transformed into a different identity (or to affirm an existing social or spiritual identity). Not all cultures have known the use of masks, but most of them have.