Senufo Unbound: Dynamics of Art and Identity in West Africa

New York’s now-defunct Museum of Primitive Art opened its landmark exhibition Senufo: Sculpture from West Africa in February 1963. Under the directorship of art historian Robert Goldwater, the museum displayed together for the first time a stunning array of arts attributed to Senufo artists: face masks, helmet masks, and figurative sculptures, all from a region spanning the borders of present-day Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Mali. Now, more than 50 years later, this new book draws on archival, museum, and field-based data, including previously unpublished letters, photographs, and objects, to look back at that tour-de-force exhibition, and offers a fresh, expanded view of a dynamic region’s arts and identities.