Cleveland Museum of Art

Mask: Eagle

Date

1800s

Medium

wood, pigment, restored eye inlays

Culture

Native North America, Northwest Coast, British Columbia, Nuxalk (Bella Coola)

Department

Art of the Americas

Institution

Cleveland Museum of Art

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."

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