Serpent Headdress (late 1800s–early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Serpent Headdress (late 1800s–early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Nearly five feet tall, this serpent headdress towered above crowds when danced. Its two faces seemed to look in all directions. Secured by a conical framework of palm branches on a costumed man’s head, it appeared at key points in initiation rites for both boys and girls. This multi-colored snake may be the serpent-spirit Ninkinanka. It can be likened to the rainbow, whose changing colors evoke how boys transform into men during initiation. A staged circa 1954 photograph depicts the serpent headdress now at the CMA. Serpent masquerades stopped in the mid-1950s when most Nalu and Baga people converted to Islam.

Object facts

• Title: Serpent Headdress
• Date: late 1800s–early 1900s
• Culture: Africa, West Africa, Guinea, possibly Baga-style maker
• Type: Mask
• Technique: Wood (Nauclea pobeguinii) and paint
• Dimensions: Overall: 148 cm (58 1/4 in.)
• Collection: African Art
• Department: African Art
• Accession number: 1960.37

A detail from the museum

In the context of boys' initiations, the serpent headdress was sometimes identified as the rainbow, which the Baga and their neighbors associate with beginnings and endings, life and death, and the continuation of lineages.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Case Western Reserve University. 1975. Traditions and Revisions : Themes from the History of Sculpture. Cleveland, Kent, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art ; Distributed by the Kent State University Press, cat. 117.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Henry John Drewal. 1989. African Art : A Brief Guide to the Collection : The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: Museum, fig. 28.
• The Visual Arts of Africa : Gender, Power, and Life Cycle Rituals. 2022 Second ed. New York: Oxford University Press, fig. 3.6, p. 83-84.

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.