"The Recently Acquired Kongo Magaaka Power Figure"

Alisa LaGamma, Ceil and Michael E. Pulitzer Curator in Charge of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, has been a curator at the Museum since 1996. In 2012, the Bard Graduate Center recognized her contribution to rethinking the history of sub-Saharan African art and culture with its Iris Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Her 1995 Columbia University dissertation "The Art of the Punu Mukudj Masquerade: Portrait of an Equatorial Society" was based on a year of fieldwork in southern Gabon. Her exhibitions over the last two decades have addressed individual authorship, divination, genesis, duality, reliquaries, textile design, contemporary art, and portraiture.