Mask: Eagle (1800s): Art, History and Details

Mask: Eagle (1800s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Across the Northwest Coast, native people engaged in renewal rites during the winter ceremonial season. This mask, with a beak that opens and head panels that move, may have been used during such celebrations. In 1998, Robert Joseph, a Northwest Coast chief, recalled that when he donned dance masks like this one as a youth, "all the world is somewhere else . . . I am the mask . . . the bird . . . the animal . . . the spirit. I transcend into the being of the mask."

Object facts

• Title: Mask: Eagle
• Date: 1800s
• Culture: Native North America, Northwest Coast, British Columbia, Nuxalk (Bella Coola)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: wood, pigment, restored eye inlays
• Dimensions: Overall: 35.6 x 45.8 x 24.2 cm (14 x 18 1/16 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: AA - Native North America
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1956.547

Collection credit

The Harold T. Clark Educational Extension Fund

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.