A ceramic female figure, with odd, caterpillarlike bumps, cradled in banana leaves. A highly polished wooden ax in the form of a bushbuck's head that is pierced by the metal blade, both loaded onto the shaft of a gun. A carved wooden throne, with a back incorporating outstretched arms and a glass-eyed head, designed not to hold a chief, or any human, but rather as a sculpture, possibly to summon rain, or a platform for the presentation of a spirit.
![]() Carved Wooden Throne |
History is partly to blame. In the colonial era, Germany controlled East Africa, and Tanzanian art was collected most avidly by museums that eventually fell behind the Iron Curtain, locked out of the sight of the West. And when Tanzania gained independence from Britain in 1961, President Julius Nyerere turned the country sharply toward socialism, aligning with Maoist China and again thwarting Western contact. Scholars, meanwhile, have favored the art of West Africa. So it was only in the 1980s, when Nyerere's successor began to relax his policies, that Tanzanian art begin to attract interest and appear on the U.S. market.
![]() "Devil Mask" |
Historically speaking, this is a bell-curved show: A few objects date to the early 19th century, a few were made post-2000, and the majority come from the late 19th and the 20th centuries, often lacking more specificity. Like most African art, Tanzanian pieces were often made of wood and other ephemeral materials. Preservation wasn't important because it was the spirit embodied by the object, rather than the item itself, that mattered.
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Among the many other notables are a frightful, wide-eyed "Ziba mask," with a howling open mouth, studded with chimpanzee teeth, and a beard of animal hide; a far more tame wooden "devil mask" of a hare, whose aging white pigment gives it an alabasterlike appearance; and a wooden helmet mask of a hyena head whose round, flat ears approach the size of salad plates.
Masks, of course, were used ceremonially, and so were wooden dance figures. Those in the swarm on view here, some as tall as 5½ feet and all naked, were used by dance societies as competitive weapons in contests. Some are overtly sexual, complete with genitalia, the better to attract a large crowd and win the day. They all have their own personalities. One noteworthy example appears to be deformed: Her slit eyes, red oval face, pregnant belly, engorged breasts, and twisted leg seem sympathetic, even attractive, but some scholars believe that she may have been deployed in acts of mockery.
![]() Ceremonial Ax |
There is much more to this exhibition, which provides merely a taste of Tanzanian art. If "Shangaa" has a flaw, it's that it unfolds without a real narrative. It takes an ethnographic approach, and groups the items thematically—showing healing art, art related to the slave trade, regalia of precolonial chiefs, and so on. That's fine as an introduction to this art, but it suggests again that much more study of the artistic traditions of East Africa remains to be done.