01/26/2022
The Cleveland Museum of Art.
In Luba-style art, an object's beauty affects how well it works.
While bowl-bearing figures had many possible uses, a royal diviner likely used this well-carved image of a woman carrying a bowl in rituals. Dusty traces of mpemba (white chalk) fleck the shining exterior and the bowl's interior, showing it once held this sacred powder. Diamond-shaped scarification marks at her waist, chest, and back add to her beauty. Her hair is carved into the cascading layered hairstyle worn in the Luba region at the turn of the twentieth century.
View it in gallery 108A and at cma.org/art/2010.454