Headdress (early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Headdress (early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Headdresses or crest masks made of antelope skin stretched over a carved head are a distinctive art form of the Cross River region in southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. Worldwide, this practice is unique. This female evocation of ideal feminine beauty was most probably worn by an Ejagham woman in the context of a female society called Ekpa, which was responsible for girls' education in preparation for marriage. The headdress represents a girl who evokes ideal female beauty and is ready for marriage. The depicted hairstyle was worn during the coming-out ceremony following the girls’ seclusion.

Object facts

• Title: Headdress
• Date: early 1900s
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Nigeria, Ejagham-style maker
• Type: Mask
• Technique: Wood, rawhide, cane, paint, bone, natural fiber, and metal
• Dimensions: Overall: 67.3 x 43.2 x 43.2 cm (26 1/2 x 17 x 17 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1990.23

A detail from the museum

Look closely along the sides of the nostrils, upper eyelids, and around the mouth. The impressions of twisted yarn shows how the hide was carefully held in place while it dried to precisely fit the sculpted wooden core.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Drewal, Henry John. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
• Young-Sánchez, Margaret. "The Cleveland Museum of Art." African Arts 30, no. 1 (1997).
• Petridis, Constantijn. South of the Sahara: Selected Works of African Art. Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2003.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.