West Africa, Mali, ca. mid 20th century CE. Fashioned from wood, paint, and beautiful fabrics, this pair of colorful ceremonial puppets used in traditional Malian puppet theater are articulated with moving arms and don lovely textile robes. They are genre figures representing a Cikela (farmer) and a Koorrishena-muso (worker who cards cotton). Both are of a rather large scale, with expressive visages comprised of overhanging foreheads, prominent aquiline noses, slightly opened lips, and black-painted eyes, brows, and mouths on chalk-white complexions. Their elegant outstretched arms present oversized hands with elegant fingers and red-painted fingernails. The female holds wooden cards painted a green block pattern with metal teeth for combing cotton and dons a red and off-white patterned robe. The male farmer wears a silky, gold hued, monochrome tone-on-tone patterned robe. Both figures were published in a highly regarded text about Sogo Bo puppets (see below). Both come with custom stands. Size: female measures 30.25" H (76.8 cm); 35.25" H (89.5 cm) with stand

Sogo Bo is a major festival that takes place twice a year in Mali where the participants, donning African fabrics, don the zoomorphic and human-shaped puppets as masks and process through the streets in celebration - with an additional important purpose of reenacting myths and legends concerning the cosmos and their ancestors as well as new aspects of the contemporary world.

Both puppets were published in "The Colorful Sogo Bo Puppets of Mali" by Mary Sue Rosen and Paul Peter Rosen (Atglen, Pennsylvania, Schiffer Publishing Ltd. 2012), figures 88 and 93. The corresponding text reads as follows: "Cikela, the farmer, stands with his arms outstretched to hold a plow. Metal rods hidden by the farmer's robe move his arms. Red paint has been applied to his fingernails for dramatic effect." "A rod puppet representing a woman carding cotton, Koorishena-muso, stands on a wooden platform. Her arms that move apart are articulated at the shoulders by metal rods. She wears a printed cotton robe and has an earring."

Provenance: private New York, USA collection

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#121886

Both puppets show surface wear with pigment losses, scuffs, deposits, and nicks here and there. The male farmer shows losses to one edge of his coiffure, one finger, and his left ear. The female is missing one earring and shows losses to her right ear and the tip of her nose, with a fissure to her coiffure. Her wooden platform shows signs of age and weathering with old losses. The cards in her hands are missing some metal teeth and retain some cotton fibers.