TSIMSHIAN PORTRAIT MASK

Reportedly Museum of the American Indian-Heye Foundation, New York (no inventory number recorded)

James Economos, New York, reportedly acquired from the above circa 1973

George Terasaki, New York, acquired from the above in 1978

Alberto Costa Romero de Tejada and Paz Cabello Carro, eds., Espíritus del Agua. Arte de Alaska y la Columbia Británica, Barcelona, 1999, p. 157, cat. no. 126

Steven C. Brown, ed., Spirits of the Water: Native Art Collected on Expeditions to Alaska and British Columbia, 1774-1910, Seattle and Vancouver, 2000, p. 131, cat. no. 91

Steven C. Brown, Transfigurations: North Pacific Coast Art. George Terasaki, Collector, Seattle, 2006, n.p., pl. 81

Carved deeply from nose to ears, this mask is a striking example of Tsimshian portraiture. The sculpture is dynamic, its extreme peaks and valleys describing a pronounced skeletal structure beneath the tautly drawn skin. A large labret is portrayed in the lower lip, and the upper lip is drawn back to expose two rows of prominently carved teeth.

The artist has angled the plane of the eyes sharply downward, following the sculptural approach seen in totem poles and headdress frontlets from the Tsimshian. The hollow beneath the eyes flows out onto the bulge of a prominent cheekbone. Beneath this, the cheek itself is hollowed between the cheekbone and jaw, and is separated from the mouth and upper lip by a finely formed nostril crease. The irises of the eyes are pierced through, with the eyelids marked by thin black lines. The nose is long and narrow, the nostrils are flat across the bottom, their openings uncut. The rounded band of the lips is fairly thin, even where it encircles the labret, which is poised above a firmly protruding chin.

Taken in combination, these features form the basis of the Tsimshian attribution. Tied-back hair is simply depicted, and the ears are shaped with naturalistic folds and hollows within them.

This is a Tsimshian artist's interpretation of the faces of his own people, his relatives and contemporaries, carved in wood to portray a female of high rank for the dramatization of clan history or mythology. A naturalistic mask is a cross between the actual physical characteristics of the people of the artist's tribal group, the carver's own sculptural approach, and the traditional stylizations established by generations of artists learning from and inspiring one another. In a very real way, the people are the masks and the masks are the people.

Steven C. Brown