FIG. 7 (left): Figure. Mumuye, Nigeria. Wood. H: 64 cm. Private collection. Photo: © Jon Lam, New York, courtesy of Sotheby’s and Heinrich Schweizer, New York. FIG. 8 (right): Figure. Mumuye, Nigeria. Wood. H: 103 cm. Collection of Michelle and Bruce Moore. Photo: © Hughes Dubois, Paris/ Brussels, courtesy of Johann Levy. Nigeria (fig. 2). Although these Mumuye subgroups speak related dialects belonging to the Adamawa branch of the Adamawa-Ubangi subgroup of the Niger-Congo language family, they exhibit considerable internal cultural diversity. A basic distinction within the Mumuye language has been proposed between a southwestern group and a northeastern group, each consisting of a number of subgroups. The former comprises the Kpugbong and the Monkin, with six and three dialects, respectively, while the latter, known as Zing, comprises seven dialects (Strybol 1985: 39). Mumuye masks of the horizontal helmet type entered into English museum collections in Oxford and London as early as 1907 and 1908, but the earliest Mumuye figures to arrive in the West are the two examples now housed at the British Museum, London, which were donated in 1922 by Capt. Eric S. Lilley (fig. 5). One of these was memorialized by the English artist Henry Moore in his sketchbook of 1922–24 (fig. 4). Initially conflated with the nearby Chamba, the term Mumuye would not be generally applied to the figures until Philip Fry devoted an article to the subject in the journal Objets et Mondes in 1970 (Fry 1970). After the pioneering work of British colonial anthropologist Charles Kingsley Meek in the 1920s, the above-mentioned Mette Bovin was one of the first professional anthropologists to conduct fieldwork among the Mumuye, in 1964 and 1968. Though the two never met, Bovin’s time in the field corresponded with that of American art historian Arnold Rubin, who first visited the Mumuye in October 1965. He briefly returned in April 1970 and February 1971. Another important but lesser-known primary source on Mumuye art is Albert Maesen, the Belgian art historian who in late 1970 and early 1971, and again in 1972, led the Benue Valley Expedition, organized by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Although Maesen himself did not publish anything from his research in Nigeria, he made his field notes and photographs available to Frank Herreman, who incorporated some of the information into his 1979 M.A. thesis at Ghent University in Belgium. The 2011 exhibition publication Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, conceived by Marla Berns, Richard Fardon, and
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