Masks and More @National Museum of African Art

Welcome to this week's Monday Must-See post. On Mondays, The Prices Do DC will offer an entry about some current exhibit in DC you should see. Sometimes, we will write the post. Sometimes, it will be taken from another publication. But no matter who is the writer, we believe it will showcase an exhibit you shouldn't miss. 

Dreams are the inspiration for much of the art in the National Museum of African Art’s latest exhibition. It certainly looks like a shadow realm. Illuminated by a twilit scheme meant to evoke late-afternoon sunshine filtered through a dense canopy of leaves, “Visions From the Forests” features mask after mask, many of which seem to have sprung from a restless mind. The whole show has the feel of a power nap: more stimulating than sleepy.

The hallucinatory implication of the title is not just a metaphor. In the tradition of the Dan people of West Africa’s upper Guinean rain forest, where this art comes from, the sandman is quite literally the maskmaker’s muse. For the Dan artist, as the wall text explains, a mask “is typically created after a dream in which someone encounters a forest or household spirit.” The mask, then, is imagination made flesh.

Of the 75 objects on display — which include silver jewelry, stone carvings, colorful fabrics and horns made of ivory — 33 are wooden masks carved by the Dan, the Vai, the Mende and other peoples of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Guinea. The most striking of these are several ­helmet-style masks that cover the entire head.

To continue reading this post, which 1st appeared in The Washington Post, click here.

Smithsonian Sunday: The Real Most Interesting Man in the World

DC's Smithsonian museums (there are 17 of them here in the city) are among America's most treasured and visited places. But the Smithsonian also publishes a series of some of the most interesting, fact-filled blogs appearing anywhere on the internet. Each Sunday, The Prices Do DC re-posts an entry that initially appeared in one of those highly-readable blogs. Hope you enjoy and maybe we'll see you soon at the Smithsonian.

The real "Most Interesting Man in the World" didn’t sell Dos Equis; Eliot Elisofon took pictures. And yes, Elisofon was allowed to touch the artwork in the museum, because he gave it to them. He also put the Brando in Marlon. And strippers kept photos of him on their dressing tables.

His Latvian last name (accent the first syllable: EL-isofon) so confounded General George S. Patton that the commander simply called him “Hellzapoppin.”

The most interesting man in the world didn’t think of himself as a good photographer, but rather as the “world’s greatest.” And while ceaseless self-promotion was his game (he hired a press agent and a clipping service), the output of his camera can be measured: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art boasts more than 50,000 black-and-white negatives and photographs, 30,000 color slides and 120,000 feet of motion-picture film and sound materials. In addition, the photographer collected and donated more than 700 works of art from Africa. Hundreds of other images are owned by the Getty Archives, and his papers and materials are housed at the University of Texas at Austin.

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