Feast-making Spoon (Wunkirmian)

A splendid standing is the feast-making spoon, or wunkirmian, which is the prerogative of the most generous woman of a village, she identifies herself though living generously, through showing that she knows how to share by throwing enormous rice feasts. And the ladling of her rice, generously shared with her kinsmen and her kinswomen, is put back into a standing figure, sort of monumentalized, really a spoon that has become a woman.

The Dan, like their neighbors the Baule and their neighbors the Senufo, love rounded calves. As muscular arms are to a Western guy, rounded calves are an expression of great feminine beauty that's put into the spoon. Her powers link her to ancestral insights and blessing, and so you have a lizard which is incised across the spoon, the lizard moving on the earth, and the earth is where the ancestors dwell.

Wood

24 3/16 x 6 7/16 x 2 13/16 in. (61.4 x 16.3 x 7.2 cm)

Gift of Katherine White and the Boeing Company

81.17.204

Provenance: [J. J. Klejman Gallery, New York]; purchased from gallery by Katherine White (1929-1980), Seattle, Washington, 1965; bequeathed to Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, 1981

Photo: Paul Macapia

Not currently on view

Resources

Exhibition HistoryCleveland, Ohio, Cleveland Museum of Art, African Tribal Images: The Katherine White Reswick Collection, July 10 - Sept. 1, 1968 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Museum, Oct. 10 - Dec. 1, 1968). Text by William Fagg. Cat. no. 68 (as Spoon).

Los Angeles, California, Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, African Art in Motion: Icon and Act, Jan. 20 - Mar. 17, 1974 (Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, May 5 - Sept. 22, 1974). Text by Robert Farris Thompson. No cat. no., p. 58-59, reproduced pls. 70, 71 (as "wunkirle" spoon).

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Praise Poems: The Katherine White Collection, July 29 - Sept. 29, 1984 (Washington, D.C., National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Oct. 31, 1984 - Feb. 25, 1985; Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, Apr. 6 - May 19, 1985; Fort Worth, Texas, Kimbell Art Museum, Sept. 7 - Nov. 25, 1985; Kansas City, Missouri, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Mar. 8 - Apr. 20, 1986). Text by Pamela McClusky. Cat. no. 26, pp. 60-61, reproduced.

Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, Art from Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back, Feb. 7 - May 19, 2002 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Oct. 2, 2004 - Jan. 2, 2005; Hartford, Connecticut, Wadsworth Atheneum, Feb. 12 - June 19, 2005; Cincinnati, Ohio, Cincinnati Art Museum, Oct. 8, 2005 - Jan. 1, 2006; Nashville, Tennessee, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Jan. 27 - Apr. 30, 2006 [as African Art, African Voices: Long Steps Never Broke a Back]). Text by Pamela McClusky. No cat. no., pp. 31-33, reproduced pl. 8.

Seattle Art Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We honor our ongoing connection to these communities past, present, and future.

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