[Aaron Henkin] Imagine this enormous wooden headdress being worn on top of a performer's head. Among the Baga people, this type of headdress is known as a D'mba. It's an abstracted representation of the universal great mother. [Speaker 2] This D'mba mask is the embodiment of beauty, both moral and physical. She has this refined face with the downturned eyes and pursed lips that one would expect of a very cultured woman. She has absolutely beautifully plated hair. Every time this mask was danced, it was oiled or painted to make it a dark, deep, lustrous black so that it would shine in the sun. But the breasts are slightly flattened and suggest that the D'mba, this female character, has nursed many children, and that's seen as an act of incredible generosity, giving one's own strength to create life in the next generation. So when people saw this mask, they saw someone who was beautiful but also morally good. When you see this hoisted a little bit above you in the gallery, you're seeing the way that it would've appeared in masquerade. There are two small holes between the breast, and that's where the masquerader would be able to see out and understand where he was going, so as not to run into the crowd.

[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.

[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.