Skeletal Bird Man

The story of the "Shona" stone carvers, a network of African sculptors active under Rhodesian white-minority rule during the 1960s, constitutes a challenging and under-explored, yet critical, chapter in the history of independence-era African modernism. Centered on a cluster of workshops, whose western expat proprietors emphasized the unschooled naiveté, spiritual directness, and authenticity of their black artists, this movement nevertheless provided those artists with both economic stability and a significant outlet for individual creative expression. It also claimed to revitalize a centuries-old legacy of excellence in stone carving evident in the celebrated bird sculptures and dry masonry traditions produced in Great Zimbabwe (ca. 1000–1600) and earlier settlements in southeastern Africa.

Over his nearly 30-year artistic career, Sylvester Mubayi’s practice evolved through a range of approaches to stone carving. Like many of his peers, his subjects frequently bring the human, animal, and metaphysical in close relation. Particularly in his early works, including skeletal bird man, he frequently deployed skeletal figures in the round as an opportunity to play with void and volume, and to show his hand at creating hollowed spaces within complex compositions. Executed in polished serpentine or river stone, such works also poetically evoke questions about the physical and temporal limits of the body. Here and elsewhere, in its frequent quotation of the bird-headed man, his work also makes an explicit claim to the legacy of Great Zimbabwe’s royal soapstone birds. A star of both New African Art: The Central African Workshop-School (1968) at MoMA and Contemporary African Arts (1969) at London’s Camden Art Centre, his work has also been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, Europe, Southern Africa, and Australia.