D’MBA: Beauty, Desire, and Collecting an African Mask

D’MBA: Beauty, Desire, and Collecting an African Mask is a focused research and exhibition project examining the large wood headdresses commonly referred to as d’mba, nimba, or yamban among the Baga, Nalu, and neighboring peoples living in Guinea, West Africa. Worn and performed by men for ceremonies and public celebrations that mark significant moments in the cycle of life, the d’mba headdress is the sculptural embodiment of female personhood, sustenance (agricultural and maternal), physical beauty, and generational continuity.​​

During the mid-20th century, at the height of the international market for African art in the United States, the d’mba became one of the objects most coveted by collectors. D’MBA unites for the first time a significant group of headdresses on loan from several art museums in the United States, including Art Institute of Chicago, Baltimore Museum of Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, National Museum of African Art, and Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition of these headdresses, which were acquired during the late 1950s by prominent collectors in the United States, occasions a rare opportunity to pursue a thorough study of these icons of African art at the intersections of mask-making, colonial art education, independence-era cultural politics and religious iconoclasm in Guinea, and the international art market.

Concurrently, in the museum’s galleries of African art, the Menil will present Baga Nimba, 2020. The seven-foot tall, gold leaf sculpture by Houston-based Nigerian artist Adeniyi (“Niyi”) Olagunju epitomizes the Pan-African and Diasporic significance of the d’mba headdress from Guinea and its reinvention as a global art form. ​

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website