The exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, traces the artistic traditions that emerged across central Nigeria’s Benue River Valley during a 400-year span. Some highlights of the exhibit are being shared with you through images provided by the Smithsonian.

Produced by artists from more than 25 ethnic groups living along the river’s Lower, Middle and Upper reaches, the objects on display — made of wood, ceramic and metal — reveal the exchange of ideas and forms among different communities. This crest mask, by the Lower Benue artist Ochai, shows a bold and expressive carving style.

The Kuteb and Yukuben peoples speak languages related to the southern Jukun and live south of them in the Middle Benue town of Takum.

Their horizontal fusion masks, which combine human and animal traits, share the tripartite form of the others exhibited in Central Nigeria Unmasked but their greater sculptural elaboration lends them a noteworthy local flavor. Upswept bovine horns and wide snouts render them animal-like, and the striations on the crests — which may refer to hair plaits — provide a human reference.

Horizontal cap mask
Yukuben peoples (most likely)
Early to mid-20th century
Hardwood, grayish-brown patina, abrus seeds, fiber
Barbier-Mueller Collection, Geneva, 1015-22
L2010.42.1
Photograph © Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva

This carved female figure is related in style to sculptures documented in the Jukun town of Wurbon Daudu, which were used for individual healing and community protection.

Other works from this Lower Benue locale are all very distinctive, with sharply cantilevered heads, flat faces and ornate headdresses.

Standing female figure
Jukun peoples, Wurbon Daudu (most likely)
Late 19th/early 20th century
Wood
The Menil Collection, Houston
L2010.62.2
Photograph Hickey-Robertson, 2010

The Chamba artist Soompa (active from the 1920s to 1940s) carved this intriguing sculpture, which reveals Soompa’s volumetric approach to the human form.

Soompa’s double figures — the torsos of a male and female sharing a single hip plinth and a pair of legs, or alternately emerging from a single forked pole — are among the most original sculptural inventions of the Middle Benue region. Soompa’s female figures have angular, flat-edged crests atop their heads, while the crests on his males are rounded with serrated edges. The double-figure sculptures, said to represent a married couple, were found among the apparatus of several different ritual associations.

Sompa (active 1920s-1940s)
Chamba peoples
1920s–1940s
Male/female double figure
Wood
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 2005.77; gift of Robert and Nancy Nooter
L2010.71.2
Photograph Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

The predominance of sculptural ceramic vessels at the center of Upper Benue religious practices represents a marked departure from the wood figures and masks typical of the other two Benue Valley subregions. The highly decorated and anthropomorphized vessels, made primarily by women artists, instead exploit the expressive capacities of clay. Such vessels served ritual functions.

This one was used by pregnant women to protect the fetus or to cure illnesses associated with pregnancy. It features a “blind spout” in the form of an open-mouthed head emerging at a diagonal from the vessel’s side.

Vessel to protect a pregnant woman and her fetus (jina bitibiyu)
Cham-Mwana peoples
Late 20th century
Ceramic
Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 73.1998.12.6
L2010.40.14
© Musée du quai Branly/Photo: Thierry Ollivier/Michel Urtado/Scala, Florence

Ceramic vessels created by artists of the Upper Benue region of central Nigeria served ritual purposes, including healing the sick, safeguarding hunters and warriors, and activating the presence of various ancestral and protective spirits.

There are striking convergences in the styles and functions of ceramic sculpture found among neighboring peoples, revealing the extent of their historical communication and exchange. The elegant twisted beard on this particular vessel is unusual and may be an innovation of the artist, Musa Rabkabaw, who created it.

Musa Rabkabaw (active 1950s–1970s)
Spirit vessel (Ngwarkandangra)
‘Bəna peoples, Riji village
Circa 1955
Ceramic
Fowler Museum at UCLA; gift of Arnold Rubin
Collected by Arnold Rubin, 1970
X86.4693
Photograph by Don Cole, 2010. © Fowler Museum at UCLA