Senufo: Art and Identity 75 FIG. 8 (left): Figure pair. Unidentified artist. Wood. H: 109 cm and 108 cm. Reported provenance: Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Edwin E. Hokin, Chicago, before 1963; Grace E. Hokin, Chicago/Palm Beach, FL. Private collection (courtesy Donald Morris Gallery, New York/Michigan). Photo: © Maggie Nimkin, New York. An analysis certificate from the Centre d'Innovation et de Recherche pour l'Analyse et le Marquage (CIRAM) in Bordeaux and signed by Dr. Céline Roque on September 29, 2010, tentatively states that each sculpture in this pair dates from between 1650 and 1805. Professor Till Förster (in Bonhams 2012: lot 285) cites a different CIRAM report suggesting similar dates for another sculptural pair identified as Senufo. Europe, and America (see also Appadurai 1988, Amselle 1998). Removing the Senufo label from the place an artist’s name would normally occupy in the description of an object encourages analysis without the boundaries of limiting categories. It alerts audiences to individual agency and specific contexts inherent to artistic production. This approach honors the distinctiveness of each work as well as its maker, sponsor, and audience, even in the absence of information about the exact people, patrons, contexts of production, or intended audiences associated with the object. This approach also shifts analysis away from an assumption that people identified with a certain cultural or ethnic background must create and use formally similar works in the same ways while acknowledging the many possibilities for an object’s construction, use, or circulation. By the 1920s and 1930s, three-corner-region artists and dealers recognized European travelers’ interest in acquiring facemasks and figurative sculptures and likely expanded their operations to meet the demand. In the 1950s, European missionaries, colonial administrators, art dealers, and museum professionals devoted significant time and resources to collecting art in northern Côte d’Ivoire for reasons they may never have fully articulated in print (fig. 2). Enterprising youths or elders in the region at the time may have welcomed the possibility of foreign investment in the arts and sought opportunities for personal or collective gain. Extant data may never reveal to what extent FIG. 9 (right): Female figure. Unidentified artist. Wood. H: 27 cm. Simonis Collection. Reported provenance: Pace Primitive, New York; Galerie Olivier Castellano, Paris. Photo: Jörg Schanze © Galerie Simonis, Düsseldorf. The horseshoe-shaped ear and wide mouth encompassing its chin distinguish this sculpture attributed on the basis of form to an unidentified artist of the northern Senufo region (compare Glaze 1993: 29, cat. 28).
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