[Aaron Henkin] This tall wooden figure is a favorite of curator Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch. [Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch] This wonderful ancestral figure, A Child of Poro, is a figure that's meant to evoke the passing generations and also the witness of the ancestors to life today. [Aaron Henkin] Poro is a secret all male society, only for males old enough to be initiated into it. This female figure would've been brought out for Poro events such as initiations or the funerals of important men. [Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch] Generally, when Poro figures were eaten up enough by termites that they really couldn't be saved, they were discarded or sold. And so the missing legs are possibly part of the story as to how this figure made it to the BMA. We know that this figure was made in the 1930s to the 1950s because she has quite the fashionable hairstyle for the time, which was meant to evoke a bird and it's beak resting against her forehead. [Aaron Henkin] If you move around to the side, you can see the hairstyle best this way, and you can notice that the silhouette of the entire figure moves in and out, almost like a zigzag pattern. [Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch] The strong jutting jaw echoes the bird-like hairstyle, and that's further echoed in the figure's breasts, and again in the pointed navel, and again in the knees. And so there's this cascade almost of cones as you look at the figure. The pointed navel has scarification marks like a crossroads over the belly button. And this scarification pattern is thought to talk about the way that the woman is the center of family and of society. So the artist's emphasis of the stomach may have something to do with that idea of life-giving ability and fertility for women.