Mask: Eagle
Unknown Artist
1800s
Medium
wood, pigment, restored eye inlays
Dimensions
35.6 × 45.8 × 24.2 cm
Classification
Sculpture
Department
Art of the Americas
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
The Harold T. Clark Educational Extension Fund
Accession Number
1956.547
About this artwork
Across the Northwest Coast, native people engaged in renewal rites during the winter ceremonial season. This mask, with a beak that opens and head panels that move, may have been used during such celebrations. In 1998, Robert Joseph, a Northwest Coast chief, recalled that when he donned dance masks like this one as a youth, "all the world is somewhere else . . . I am the mask . . . the bird . . . the animal . . . the spirit. I transcend into the being of the mask."