Luba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19th century
Wood
Height 6 inches (15.2 cm)
Provenance: James Stephenson, Brooklyn, New York; Mary Nooter Roberts, Washington, DC
Published: Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, 1996, p. 183
A female bust rises from the upper edge of a thick rectangular frame, the head turned forward with lidded eyes, a narrow nose, and a small closed mouth set within a face worn smooth from long handling. The coiffure is dressed in tiered horizontal ridges that sweep back from the brow and terminate in a raised knot at the nape, a treatment that on Luba figures signals status and social identity rather than mere ornament. Across the shoulders and down the outer edges of the frame the surface carries a deep reddish brown patina broken by lighter abraded passages where the wood has been rubbed against over many years of use.
The katatora was a friction oracle used by Luba diviners, worked by drawing a small disc or block across the flat upper surface until it caught and stopped, the point of arrest supplying the answer to the question being put. Objects of this class were among the most intimate implements of Luba divination practice, and the female figure surmounting them refers to the spirit medium through whom the diviner's knowledge was understood to pass. The open rectangular body distinguishes this example from the more common solid form, and the interior edges of the aperture show the same worn finish as the exterior.
Mary Nooter Roberts, 1958 to 2018, was a scholar and curator of African art who served as senior curator at the Museum for African Art in New York and later as chief curator at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Allen F. Roberts she organised Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, a landmark exhibition and catalogue that reframed Luba objects as instruments of historical memory rather than as ethnographic specimens alone. She held a professorship in world arts and cultures at UCLA and published extensively on Luba art, divination, and the visual culture of memory. This piece appears in that catalogue and comes from her own collection.
We ship free anywhere in the world, fully insured, packed by hand.
Luba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 19th century
Wood
Height 6 inches (15.2 cm)
Provenance: James Stephenson, Brooklyn, New York; Mary Nooter Roberts, Washington, DC
Published: Mary Nooter Roberts and Allen F. Roberts, Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, 1996, p. 183
A female bust rises from the upper edge of a thick rectangular frame, the head turned forward with lidded eyes, a narrow nose, and a small closed mouth set within a face worn smooth from long handling. The coiffure is dressed in tiered horizontal ridges that sweep back from the brow and terminate in a raised knot at the nape, a treatment that on Luba figures signals status and social identity rather than mere ornament. Across the shoulders and down the outer edges of the frame the surface carries a deep reddish brown patina broken by lighter abraded passages where the wood has been rubbed against over many years of use.
The katatora was a friction oracle used by Luba diviners, worked by drawing a small disc or block across the flat upper surface until it caught and stopped, the point of arrest supplying the answer to the question being put. Objects of this class were among the most intimate implements of Luba divination practice, and the female figure surmounting them refers to the spirit medium through whom the diviner's knowledge was understood to pass. The open rectangular body distinguishes this example from the more common solid form, and the interior edges of the aperture show the same worn finish as the exterior.
Mary Nooter Roberts, 1958 to 2018, was a scholar and curator of African art who served as senior curator at the Museum for African Art in New York and later as chief curator at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Allen F. Roberts she organised Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History, a landmark exhibition and catalogue that reframed Luba objects as instruments of historical memory rather than as ethnographic specimens alone. She held a professorship in world arts and cultures at UCLA and published extensively on Luba art, divination, and the visual culture of memory. This piece appears in that catalogue and comes from her own collection.
We ship free anywhere in the world, fully insured, packed by hand.
