Mask, Dogon; Mali
Wood, fiber, pigments; H. 20 1/2"
This animal mask with flaring horns,
Gomintogo, representing a mythological or
extinct animal, is but one of some eighty different
varieties of mask worn by young adult members at
the occasion of funerary celebrations presided over
by the Awa society that mark the end of the
mourning period or the anniversary of a death. The
abstracted facial form is based on that of a twenty-foot-long
"great mask" that is carried but not worn
and that functions as an ancestral effigy of the
first death. All Dogon masks lead the spirits of
the deceased toward the ancestral realm. The bold
planes of this mask are set in stark perpendicular
relation to one another. The rising "ears"
lighten the otherwise compressed, powerful facial
features.
