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ART on View Visions from the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone 94 FIG. 1 (below): William Siegmann inspecting Sande masks at the National Museum of Liberia, Monrovia, 1966 or 1967. Photographer unknown. © Indiana University Liberian Collections/William Siegmann Collection. FIG. 2 (right): Ndoli jowei mask. Mende or Southern Bullom (Sherbro), Sierra Leone. Late 19th century. Wood. H: 40 cm. Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Gift of William Siegmann, inv. 2011.70.4. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone belong to the Upper Guinea Forest region, a zone of dense tropical rainforest that runs from Guinea in the west to Nigeria in the east. The forest and its associated riches have long influenced the movement and prosperity of this region’s inhabitants as well as its cultural and aesthetic heritage. Whether cleared to accommodate new agricultural settlements or embraced as the spiritual and intellectual wellspring of the region’s numerous initiation associations, the forest has provided a vital framework for human life in the region. In numerous and ever-changing ways, the forest provides the physical and conceptual terrain where actions and ideas are developed and pursued. For traditional initiation associations such as the Sande, Poro, and Thoma, the forest has long been the place where young women and men experience life-shaping events. It is also the source of specialized knowledge gleaned from the tutelary spirits believed to reside there. In Dan society, for example, forest-dwelling spirits visit individuals in dreams and request physical manifestation in the form of masks. Among the Loma and Mende peoples, masks whose forms and materials explicitly or implicitly refer to the animal world are among their most treasured of artworks. Examples of these and other works from the traditional cultures of Liberia and Sierra Leone are the subject of Visions from the Forests, an exhibition organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts that is touring U.S. museums until the end of 2015. By Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers Liberia and Sierra Leone: A Brief History Liberia and Sierra Leone have long held a prominent place in global history. The region was among the first sub-Saharan places that Europeans visited. In the 1460s, Portuguese merchants made initial contact with the coastal inhabitants of these areas, establishing trading posts in what they named, respectively, the “Lioness Mountains” (Serra Leoa) and the “Pepper Coast” (after the melegueta pepper that grew abundantly along the Liberian coast). There, they interacted with the nolonger extant Sapi peoples, a loose confederation of the forebears of some of today’s area residents. With the arrival of the Dutch and the British during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more trade developed, including the transatlantic slave trade. Both countries also figure prominently in the history of abolition and emancipation. Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, was founded by freed slaves from the United States in 1792. Following Britain’s abolition of the international slave trade in 1807, Freetown served as a repatriation point for enslaved Africans that the British Navy seized from vessels bound for South America. Liberia became a homeland for freed U.S. slaves from the 1820s on and in 1847 was officially declared the Republic of Liberia. Protracted civil wars raged intermittently between 1989 and 2003 in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Large-scale looting and destruction accompanied these conflicts, which cost the lives of an estimated three hundred thousand people, severely ruptured civil society, and seriously damaged both countries’ cultural heritages. Countless Sierra Leonean and Liberian artworks were lost forever. Peoples of the Upper Guinea Forest Region and Their Art Liberia and Sierra Leone are inhabited by numerous cultural groups. Altogether, some forty different languages are spoken that belong to various language families. Visions from the Forests includes artworks from more than a dozen of these groups, some of which are more fully represented than others. Almost one-third of the display is comprised of works


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