Dance Mask

During the long, harsh winters in the Artic, local people traditionally gathered indoors for celebrations of performance cycles. These featured feasts and masked dances in order to maintain harmony between the human, animal, and supernatural realms for the coming year. The masks worn by costumed dancers were often danced in pairs and represented a variety of animals, supernatural beings, and animal helpers. They were valued but not considered sacred, and humorous examples—including caricatures of local personalities—were meant to entertain the spectators.

Numbers of ceremonial masks made by the Yup'ik peoples of Alaska were collected by George Heye of the Museum of the American Indian in the first part of the twentieth century. Heye in turn sold many of them, often to the New York dealer Julius Carlebach. The masks appealed to the expatriate Surrealist artists who lived in New York during the early 1940s. This mask is said to have belonged to two well-known individuals—the Surrealist painter Wolfgang Paalen, and the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss. Nelson Rockefeller acquired it in 1952 in Los Angeles and gave it to the Museum of Primitive Art in 1963.