68 BELOW, TOP TO BOTTOM Large mask with protruding eyes. Shu, Jinsha site, Guanghan city, Sichuan, China. 1200–650 BC. Bronze. Sanxingdui Masks Cultural Museum, Guanghan. Photo courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana. Bird head. Shu, Jinsha site, Guanghan city, Sichuan, China. 1200–650 BC. Bronze. Sanxingdui Masks Cultural Museum, Guanghan. Photo courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana. Animal mask. Shu, Jinsha site, Guanghan city, Sichuan, China. 1200–650 BC. Bronze. Sanxingdui Masks Cultural Museum, Guanghan. Photo courtesy of the Bowers Museum, Santa Ana. MUSEUM news WARRIORS AND MOTHERS New York City—The figures created by Mbembe master carvers from southeastern Nigeria are among the earliest and most visually dramatic wood sculptures preserved from sub-Saharan Africa. Beginning December 9, a unique body of these works will go on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Warriors and Mothers: Epic Mbembe Art. Created between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and striking for their synthesis of intense rawness and poetry, these representations of seated figures—mothers nurturing their offspring and aggressive male warriors—were originally integral parts of monumental carved drums positioned at the epicenter of spiritual life, the heartbeat of Mbembe communities. When these electrifying creations were presented for the first time in a Paris gallery in 1974, they immediately caught the attention of the art world. That exhibition was a groundbreaking event that revealed a tradition unlike any that had defined African art until then. Dispersed internationally among private and institutional collections, these works will be reunited in New York for the first time in this installation. The catalyst for this presentation that will bring together loans from European and American collections was the striking Mbembe maternity figure acquired by the Met in 2010. It is one of only four distinctive interpretations of this subject by Mbembe masters that survive. These nurturing female exemplars will be seen in the company of the heroic male figures that are their foils, including a dramatic standing male figure from a French private collection, which has been identified as one Chief Appia. This warrior figure holds the trophy head of an enemy and exudes sheer power through its muscular physique and an especially rough surface of exposed wood whorls. Warriors and Mothers: Epic Mbembe Art will be on view until September 7, 2015. It will be the subject of an article in the next issue of Tribal Art magazine. CHINA’S LOST CIVILIZATION Santa Ana—During the summer of 1986, construction workers accidentally uncovered an astounding cache of more than 200 ancient jades, tools, burned animal bones, more than sixty elephant tusks, monumental bronzes, and a life-sized statue of a nobleman at Sanxingdui, China, about forty kilometers outside of the Sichuan Province capital of Chengdu. Even though most of the contents had been ritually destroyed in antiquity, this chance discovery of two “sacrificial pits” was one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century and forced scholars to rewrite early Chinese history. The objects were dated to about 1300 BC, a time when it was thought that the cradle of Chinese civilization lay 1,200 kilometers to the northeast on the Yellow River in China’s central plain. The Shu culture, as the new finds came to be identified with, left no written record or human remains and appears to have existed for only about 500 years before it vanished, but its art is both distinctive and remarkable. In 2001, another archaeological discovery, this time in the nearby city of Chengdu at Jinsha, revealed further ancient artifacts relating to this mysterious culture. China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery of Sanxingdui, currently at the Bowers Museum, presents more than 120 of the most important artworks discovered in both Sanxingdui and Jinsha. In doing so, it also examines the questions of where this 3,500-year-old culture could have come from and why it abruptly vanished. The exhibition can be seen until March 14, 2015, after which it will open again at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Maternity figure: seated mother and child. Mbembe, Ewayon River region, Cross River Province, Nigeria. 17th– 18th century. Wood, pigment, resin, nails. H: 108 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, 2010 and 2008 Benefit Funds, Laura G. and James J. Ross, David and Holly Ross, Noah- Sadie K. Wachtel Foundation Inc. and Mrs. Howard J. Barnet Gifts, 2010 (2010.256). Photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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