CategoriesAntiquities, Artifacts, and Religious Objects
Mask
Masks for the face or head, used in ritual, theatre, burial and festival, and taken up by modern and contemporary artists.
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About
A mask replaces one face with another. The oldest surviving examples often served the dead: Mycenaean nobles were buried with beaten gold masks, and Tutankhamun's mummy wore one of gold inlaid with glass and stone. Greek actors wore masks to show character, and Japanese Noh masks, carved in cypress, seem to change expression as the performer tilts his head.
In many African societies, masks appear with full costumes, music and dance, and embody spirits or ancestors rather than simply hiding the wearer. On the Northwest Coast of North America, transformation masks open during performance to reveal a second face inside. Modern artists looked to masks for new ways to simplify the face, from James Ensor's crowds of grotesques to Pablo Picasso's Cubism. Today Hervé Youmbi of Cameroon and the Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin rework masks to question how they are collected and displayed.