Unidentified Baga Artist
Date:
Before 1938
Medium:
Wood, copper alloy tacks, and iron tacks
Size:
Depth: 28 3/8″
Width: 13 3/8″
Height: 48 5/8″

D’mba represents a woman at the height of her power. She is confident and beautiful, elderly, and a mother. Her bold gaze, intricate hairstyle, and flattened breasts speak to these qualities. Neither spirit nor deity, she is a symbol of community identity, a sculptural ideal created to honor women, inspire girls, and reflect the belief that Baga culture was forged and sustained by mothers.

Here, D’mba appears as she would have during the community celebrations in which she danced. However, the raffia fiber skirt and cotton shawl are not original. BMA conservators fabricated these garments only recently.

Gift of Alan Wurtzburger BMA 1957.97

Dancing the D’mba

Transcript

[Speaker 1] The D’mba in our collection weighs 83 pounds, so you can imagine why only very strong young men danced this mask. The D’mba masquerade involves slow, graceful movement, and when you think about the weight of the mask and the unwieldiness of it, this very tall, heavy head that is far above the head of the actual dancer, you can understand why the movements would be measured and elegant and not vigorous or boisterous at all.

A Conversation About the Tacks

Transcript

[Aaron Henkin] Hi, Aaron Henkin here from WYPR, joined by Christine Downie Walden, objects conservator. Here at the BMA, you see all these brass tacks, which I imagine if this was to be worn outside, would just catch the light and really animate this thing.
[Christine Downie] You’re absolutely right. In fact, the intention was to wear it during the daytime so the sunlight would be reflected dramatically off the tacks. The majority of the tacks are brass with steel shanks, but a number of them are just iron and they’re very dull. You’ll see there’s a few of them that are like that. It came to us back in 1957 and the brass tacks were heavily tarnished, but we also discovered as we were treating that there was this very waxy green corrosion product on them, and this is a result of the fact that these headdresses were regularly oiled to make them shiny. This type of corrosion product that results when you get oils with different types of metal, and it is extremely hard to remove.
[Aaron Henkin] Once you get this object in the lab, do you have to pull the tax out individually to clean them?
[Christine Downie] So if you try and pull out one of these tacks, you will break the surrounding. encrustation. We have real difficulties trying to polish these without damaging the surrounding area. We are looking right now at ways of trying to remove more of the green waxy material.