Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Female Face Mask (ngady mwaash)
Not on view
From February 7 through March 5, 1927, the exhibition "Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art," organized by Alain Locke, was on view at The New Art Circle, a gallery owned by J. B. Neumann, an early champion of German Expressionism and American Modernism. About five hundred works were exhibited and made available for purchaseon that occasion. Locke’s goal was to assemble sufficient funds to create a Harlem Museum of African Art, where any unsold works would be permanently housed. His stated goal was "to preserve and interpret the ancestral arts and crafts of the Negro and make them effective as fresh cultural inspiration for Negro art and culture in America."
This ngady mwaash mask included in the exhibition was featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, announcing Kuba art as the focus of the collection. Its painted geometric patterns echo the Kuba’s extensive corpus of decorative arts.
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