Ritual Expressions: African Adornment from the Permanent Collection @ LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Ritual Expressions: African Adornment from the Permanent Collection

Los Angeles County Museum of Art - LACMA

February 23 – July 6, 2025

Man’s Royal Ceremonial Robe, Africa, Nigeria, Yoruba people,

early 20th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

Marcel and Zaira Mis Collection, 

purchased with funds from the LACMA 50th Anniversary Gala

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Detail of Man’s Royal Ceremonial Robe, Africa, Nigeria, 

Yoruba people, early 20th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

Marcel and Zaira Mis Collection, 

purchased with funds from the LACMA 50th Anniversary Gala

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Man’s Headdress, Gishu or Acholi people, mid-20th century

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

Marcel and Zaira Mis Collection, 

purchased with funds from the LACMA 50th Anniversary Gala

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

Robe, Africa, Cameroon, Grasslands Bamum people, 

mid-20th century 

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 

Marcel and Zaira Mis Collection, 

purchased with funds from the LACMA 50th Anniversary Gala

Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Ritual Expressions: African Adornment from the Permanent Collection. Bodily adornments, such as ritual textiles, clothing, and headwear, are created by the many cultures throughout the African continent. The exhibition explores how adornments are constructed to express societal conventions, and reveals their critical role in establishing and transmitting the wearer’s identity and rank. Ritual Expressions is a focused presentation that brings together more than 30 examples of a rich diversity of textiles, clothing, and headwear representing more than 20 cultures from Africa, all drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection.

The exhibition explores how adornments are constructed to express societal conventions, and reveals their critical role in establishing and transmitting the wearer’s identity and rank. For example, a striking 28-foot-long raffia palmfiber textile is wrapped around the body to transform into a dimensional ceremonial skirt, enlarging the wearer’s figure while indicating status and wealth within the community. Dramatic headdresses sculpted with diverse natural materials, such as gourds, raffia palms, bast fibers, and cotton, are embellished with distinctive elements, such as pigments, feathers, fur, shells, or glass beads. A person’s individuality, intelligence, and spirit are acknowledged by crowning the head with structures imbued with cultural traditions, which encircle and rise above the head, magnifying the subject’s stature and status. African adornments such as these are testaments to the meticulous craftsmanship of their creators, physically and symbolically linking the present with past legacies.

LACMA has developed and presented a number of exhibitions of African Art, including Shaping Power: Luba Masterworks from the Royal Museum for Central Africa (2013), African Cosmos (2014), and The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts (2017), all curated by the late Dr. Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, consulting curator of African Art. Many of these exhibitions featured significant works from the permanent collection. Additionally, LACMA will be working with artists and creative leaders in West Africa on future collaborations and programs that will augment the museum’s exhibition programming.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Ritual Expressions is curated by Sharon S. Takeda, Senior Curator and Department Head of Costume and Textiles.

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART - LACMA

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Artist Hako Hankson @ Primo Marella Gallery, Milan - "The Urgency of Thought" Exhibition

Hako Hankson

The Urgency of Thought

Primo Marella Gallery, Milan

25 April - 11 June 2024

Born in 1968 in Bafang, Cameroon, HAKO HANKSON now lives and works in Douala. A self-taught artist, whose real name is Gaston Hako, with a diploma in car mechanics, was promised a completely different future. However, he chose painting and the elements that forged his youth. 

Hako Hankson’s approach is to help and learn from his peers, it’s a true ode to the past and myths of ancient African civilizations. The artist transcribes, with legitimacy, the history of ancestral rites by giving them a contemporary resonance

 

Hako  Hankson  grew up under the influence of the art and culture of the sources of his country. His father was a notable person in Cameroon and also a sculptor and musician of the Royal Palace. Hako was therefore brought up surrounded by objects of initiation rites: masks, statuettes, totems etc. 

Hako Hankson has created a reception centre and a place of residence for visual artists facing difficulties, this structure, called “In and off art center”, was inaugurated in 2013 by his own means.

Hako Hankson's works possess an essential recognisability, the use of masks, tribal figures, the careful choice of colours and the abundance of details and decorations make his works a concentration of Africa. They are distinct and carefully delineated elements that narrate, through expressions and compositions, the cultural history of this continent. 

The use of masks stems from a profound philosophy of life, practised and recognised by Hako Hankson, handed down to him by his father: animism.

"My father, for his part, drew me into animist beliefs: for example, by using masks and statuettes in a dialogue with the afterlife, and that's how I came to understand the power of masks, what they could carry as a spirit, a soul, something subtle that we can't control".

His works have an intrinsic narrativity, in fact, although the viewer sees well-defined elements, plots and fantasies develop on the canvas enriching the aesthetic beauty of the masks. One often comes across human figures, convivial scenes depicted as if they were small visions within the works themselves. This indicates a link that Hako Hankson has always wanted to express: animism uses elements, such as masks, to converse with the afterlife and thus take on a spiritual, as well as an earthly character, acting as a bridge between soul and body. 

In the artist's canvases there appear flashes of humanity, encounters, human figures in their own right, or other elements, even animals, which always strictly maintain an almost rupestrian line of representation.

In fact, Hako Hankson's works also turn their attention to the past, underlying which is an important creative study of ancient African graphic descriptions. Not far removed from what are, for us, rupestrian paintings. In this way, the artist expresses a strong attachment to his own land, communicating it to Africans, showing their shortcomings and problems, almost in a codified language that, only thanks to a strong globalisation, becomes familiar to us too, reminding us of American or European artists who, appropriating a very similar imagery, revolutionised western aesthetics. In his works, the artist describes what has always surrounded him, through a universal language that is as clear as it is intricate.

He goes back to his origins, narrating different situations and characters, as humanity once did, but he evolves his language, enriches it and complicates it to make it futuristic. So as to attract the interest of the viewer, who loses himself in the immensity of the details.

Hako Hankson's painting addresses his homeland, but at the same time he wants to export what he sees as contemporary Africa to the world, narrating it through elements of what Africa once was, while maintaining its tribal nature. It is a message of hope, a new language that can lead the African continent to a better future.

PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY

Via Valtelina 31 - 20159 Milano

www.primomarellagallery.com