Yoruba cosmology dictates that before coming to earth, each person visits Ajala, the maker of heads in heaven, who has the power to produce a head that is defective and full of a difficult destiny. When this happens, one can seek the support of a personal inner head. A symbolic head is placed in a house like this and consulted often.
Wood, leather, cloth, cowrie shells, mirror
21 9/16 in. (54.7 cm)
Diam.: 11 11/16 in.
Gift of Katherine White and the Boeing Company
81.17.577
Now on view at the
Seattle Art Museum
Resources
Exhibition HistoryLos 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. 101, reproduced pl. 135 (as house of the head).
Published ReferencesBerns, Marla, Agbaye: Yoruba Art in Context, at the UCLA Museum of Cultural History (Winter 1979), p. 8-9.
Drewal, Henry John, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, in African Arts, Vol. 23, No. 1, Nov. 1989, illus. p. 71, no. 7
Lawal, Babatunde, Ori: The Significance of the Head in Yoruba Sculpture, in the Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 41 No. 1 (Spring 1985), p. 31-103.
Ogunba, Oyin, Crowns and "Okute" at Idowa, in Nigeria Magazine, Issue 83 (1964), p. 249-261.
Ori Inu: Inner Head and the Concept of Individuality, p. 26-33.
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.
