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Published Toma/Loma Gazelégi Mask
William Siegmann (1943-2011), a connoisseur of the art of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, collected this mask personally in Liberia. He later gave it to our friend Edward DeCarbo (1944-2024), whose family, in turn, sold it to me. In Loma (Toma) masquerade traditions and the Poro society (the male initiatory association), gazelégi masks appear in ceremonies concerned with salé, the medicine and secret knowledge acquired through spiritual means. This gazelégi mask was not worn, though that does not mean it wasn’t performed: a mask can be held or placed somewhere and publicly acted upon, or through. The surface of this mask attests to years of receiving ritual sacrifice. Siegmann conservatively placed the age of this work as mid-twentieth century, though its richly libated surface suggests to me that is a good two or three decades older than that.
The mask appears as plate 27 on page 141 of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s exhibition catalog Visions from the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone (2014, ed. by Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers and Alexander Bortolot). Price on request.
20″ height with base
