AboutKofipage

What is your background in carving and
when and why did you begin carving
African miniatures?
I’ve been whittling for thirty years, mostly fish
and the hulls of sailboats – the shapes of which
I like. 20+ years ago I carved a Mamy Wata image
for my boat – she was called Mamy Wata. When
my daughter-in-law, Linda, was pregnant about
seven years ago, I decided to make her an akua
ba and right away I knew it was going to be
small. It came out about two inches tall, and
with very thin wire I attached the tiniest beads
imaginable (got in Ghana in the 70s) for earrings
and at the waist. It came out pretty well, and
my wife Shelley, who had made doll house
miniatures for a long time, saw it and said she
wanted one too, so I made another. A month or
so later Elisabeth Cameron did me a favor and in
thanks I made a third for her; she had not long
before done the “doll” book for the Fowler
Museum (UCLA). By then I was off and running,
and I carved a series of tiny “child” images:
Fante, Tabwa, Namji, and others that I gave to
Linda and Tom’s child. I carved a few spoons
and began making miniature masks, and the
rest, as they say, is history.
The house began to fill up with my carvings so I
started giving them away to friends. Their
responses were gratifying, the carving itself
was enjoyable and meditative, and so far I have
given away more than 150 images, nearly all
miniatures.

Why Miniatures
Because they can be started and finished fairly
rapidly, sometimes in an hour but more often in
two, three or more. Each one is new, each a
set of challenges. I am after all not making
something, say a mask, which will be worn; the
things I carve are only to look at. And the
satisfaction of seeing a completed work comes
fairly fast, unlike the protracted or absent
gratification one gets in writing for publication
or classroom teaching. I also have no desire
whatsoever to make things full size – which
would take much more time, a few days or even
a week or more, than a mini -- just as I have no
interest (or very little) in making true-sized
replicas which could be called fakes if they
were to be antiqued (see below for an
exception or two….). There is no room in the
house for life-sized masks or figures, and in fact
the minis are beginning to crowd us out, which
stimulated me to try to sell some. There is also
a challenge to make something very small, say a
Senufo “firespitter” type mask about 4 or 5
inches long when the original is three feet long.
Original detailing usually can’t be replicated, so
I have to decide what to include, exclude or
simplify to give the mask a “life-like”
appearance. Then too a group of miniatures can
be displayed in a fairly small space, and there is
something charming, even fascinating about
miniatures that is hard to define, but which
helps to account for many dollhouses made or
enjoyed by children of all ages, including me.

Which African peoples or object types
did you start with?
Apart from akua ma, which I have experienced
in Ghana and photographed in shrines, I carved
several Igbo masks, a few of which I have in the
house as models. I work mostly from photo-
graphs, but of course using real things is much
better, because seldom are masks or figures
photographed or published in the round – in
fact a good way of spotting fakes, so often
made from photographs, is seeing
how parts of an image not often
shown in illustrations are poorly
done or wrong in the fakes.
I also began a series of “composite,
three-part horizontal masks” a very
widespread ur-type of mask with the same
head, snout and horns (the 3 parts) and animal
combinations (antelope, warthog, croc, buffalo,
etc) but interpreted differently among more
than 40 African peoples from Senegal to
Cameroon. This mask type has fascinated me
since grad school in the 60s, when Douglas
Fraser identified the genre, which Monni
Adams wrote on for her M.A. Later Patrick
McNaughton pursued it (2 Articles in African
Arts XXIV, 2, 1991, and XXV, 2, 1992). One
remarkable feature is that many of these masks
are used locally in rooting evil influences, such
as witches, out of village life. These ritually
used masks must have a vital and deep history
for their forms and functions to have spread
and survived for many centuries. I’ve carved
about thirty of them so far. Some – like the
complex openwork of Baga Banda masks -- are a
terrific challenge, and others, such as Bamana
Komo with real horns feathers and all sorts of
added materials, ask for creative solutions; for
half-inch horns, for example, I have used barrel
cactus thorns. I have two shelves of these
masks at home, a kind of changing display as I
add to and subtract from the corpus.
I sometimes begin to work on a genre as a
challenge to my craft, as Bamana chi wara are
with their delicate openwork forms. I avoided
these for two or three years, then took the
plunge. I had some breakage for a while, usually
glueable, but more recently there have been
fewer problems, and I have even done a few at
the 1:12 dollhouse scale, meaning that the male
antelope with his openwork mane is about
three inches or less tall. This is precise,
meticulous carving, yet overcoming the
difficulties is fun, and has given me renewed
respect for Japanese carvers of Netsuke, those
incredibly detailed, tiny and skillfully made
miniatures. It is a marvel that artists can even
see some of the detail, much less execute it. I
say this as my own eyesight deteriorates.
Lately I have tried a few Kuba masks, such as
the Ngaddy aMwaash that is on the top left of
the homepage. Both the fine geometric
painting and the beadwork on that one were
new obstacles, and both took a lot of patience
and time. Earlier I started playing with the
delicate forms of Baule masks just to see if I
could do them. Play, by the way, is an
important dimension of my interest in this sort
of carving, playing with form, detail, color,
texture, planes, and it has led me into creating
my own “African” style, which I call the
“BaCóle”. This began when I tried to replicate
the famous Mestach Boa mask (Evan M. Maurer,
The Intelligence of Form: An Artist Collects
African Art, Minneapolis, 1991, p. 113). Its
planes and subtlety intrigued me, so I made a
variation on it, with different planes and
shapes, then another; I’ve made ten or fifteen
by now. I long ago gave that mask away, and
several others in the series, but I continue to
play with it.

Have you set out to make a piece that
you hope will deceive its viewers?
Well, yes, I have to admit I have, but I have not
been very successful at it.
(More to come on this topic at a later date)

Why the name Kofi?
An amusing story, really. Shortly after arriving
in Accra, for my second and longest (7 mo.)
visit to Ghana, we went to a long yet
beautifully sung church service. On emerging
after 2 ½ hours, we were greeted heartily –
the only white folks present. After several
minutes of engaged conversation, one older
gent asked me my birthday; I replied April 15.
No, he said, your BIRTHday. April 15, 1935.
No, No, your birthDAY, and I finally got it:
“Friday,” I told him (guessing). Ah HA,
welcome to Accra, Kofi, welcome to
Ghana. So, like Kofi Annan and about 1/7th of
the population, I am Friday born. That trip
and three subsequent ones resulted in the
1977 Arts of Ghana exhibition and book,
written with Doran Ross, (UCLA, Museum of
Cultural History)
That trip cemented my long interest in the
arts of personal decoration, and of course in
the splendid royal arts of Ghana, featuring
sumptuous gold and rich locally-woven
textiles, as well as the more democratic but
equally colorful arts of Fante Asafo military
companies. In the summer of ’74 I was
enstooled as an asafohene or military captain
by Co Number 1 at Gomoa Degu. At the
annual PathClearing Festival, during the
processional marches of Co # 1, the red,
white and blue-dressed subgroup in the
picture rushed me (unforewarned) and lifted
me into the air. Oh oh, I thought for an
instant, I’m headed for the missionary pot (of
fable), but in fact they were honoring me,
taking me aside for my rites of passage, and I
later marched with other member of my
company. After prayers were intoned and I
was doused with lots of cheap perfume, part
of the installation (enstooling) ritual was
drinking a tumbler of locally made gin with
two or three tablespoons of gunpowder
stirred in, to “insure my strength and
invincibility.”
I returned to the same community for the
next year’s festival with a few of the many
gifts I was asked to bring back for Co No.1,
and I marched with them again.

Repetition and Copying; Replication
vs. Innovation?
These are age-old tensions in the art/craft
process. Apprentices in Africa normally begin
with repeating the same forms as their
master, basically copying him, sometimes for
years. Most learning of whatever sort of
course involves copying, imitation, repeating
oneself over and over again until something is
learned, becomes a part of the self –
embodied --that is virtually impossible to UN-
learn. I have carved enough mini Dan masks
by now, perhaps 30 or more, that I can “get
it right” more or less without looking at a
photograph. At the same time, especially
now, I feel the urge to depart from the
model, to make something new or never
before seen. So I am making little Dan masks
that are variations on the theme, never seen
before but still solidly in that style.
In fact the Dan series is itself interesting;
possibly it provides some insight into the sort
of inventiveness we see in any series of
masks from one region in Africa. If I start
with a picture of a mask in front of me, but
as I shape the new carving I make a mistake,
the shape coming out a bit different from the
model, I will proceed anyway. In the end I
have made a “Dan” mask that never existed
before, but that conforms to type, still looks
authentic. (Naturally there is nothing
authentic about my pieces apart from the
fact that they are my carvings based,
sometimes loosely, on African prototypes.)
Especially when carvers have worked for
years within one genre, I can sense them
wanting to vary the theme (as I do), make
smaller or larger departures, and thus new
masks. There is no fun or challenge in making
the exact same thing over and over again. By
this time, then, I have internalized Dan style
well enough to make “new” ones without
starting out to copy one, although I marvel at
the almost endless variations the Dan corpus
includes
Then too there is praiseful imitation and
copying, sometimes to the point of fakery;
the two can be the same form, I guess,
though the intention is different. I have
done few fakes because I am not really
interested in deceiving people, at least not
often. I have pretty much stuck to
miniatures.
The best fakers, of course, are the ones still
undetected, those whose works reside in
museum cases and on the shelves of wealthy
and “discerning” collectors, and I chuckle at
the no doubt successful deceptions that are
out there fooling all the “experts,” myself
included. Yet I was not fond of having been
duped with the Asante mother and child I
bought in Accra in 1985, thinking that it was
not really old but that it had been made for
Asante use, probably in an Asante shrine. (Of
course I displayed that piece in the “Arts of
Ghana” show, along with four or five other
things from the same Kumasi workshop). I
learned about its recent manufacture only a
few years later, when Doran Ross discovered
the workshop in which these figures, combs,
and fans were made, within months of their
being purchased by us.
The difference between artful, creative
fakery – which is often NOT actually copying,
but the invention of a plausible NEW form
that accords with analogous known works in
the same style – and slavish copying is in
some real measure the intent to deceive, to
gain financially from a fraudulent series of
actions: from carving (or casting) to working
over the surface to achieve the deceptive
patina of “apparent age” which collectors
and museums so much prefer over fresh
surfaces. (a big question is, why?) And on to
the stories told as the fakes are passed from
hand to hand. I have lately become
interested in connoisseurship, in part
because so few younger people in the field
seem to be. (See the First Word, “A Crisis in
Connoisseurship?” in African Arts, XXXVI, 1,
spring 2003.
I am just now documenting a lively Igbo
faking workshop that has been responsible
over the years for numerous crested masks
and a series of pipe-smoking titled women
sitting on stools. One irony is that I actually
bought a mask from the master faker of that
shop, now dead, when I visited his
compound in 1983, a double irony I guess in
that the mask I bought from him was of a
pink-faced white man! It was published in
the Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (UCLA
Museum of Cultural History, 1984) book and
shown in that traveling exhibition