From shrine figures to historic men’s masks, the MFA’s department of African and Oceanic art includes important works from the 16th to 21st century that span two continents.

Art of Africa

The highlights of the MFA’s collection primarily hail from West and Central Africa and predominantly date from the late 19th and 20th century. Included are fine Yoruba sculptures from royal courts in Nigeria, and decorative arts, from textiles to wood masks to metalwork. A small group of bronze works (copper-alloy pieces made in the lost wax-casting technique) made in the Benin Kingdom are much earlier, as they date from the 16th and 17th centuries. As part of its ongoing commitment to colonial-era provenance, the Museum is seeking a resolution regarding the ownership and display of the five Benin Kingdom works in its collection.

Arts of the Pacific

The MFA’s Oceanic collection includes works reflecting traditions that stretch from Indonesia to New Zealand and Hawaii. Three guardian figures from Borneo are the highlight of the Museum’s collection of commemorative sculpture. A Maori funnel, used to feed a chief during the sacred and physically challenging process of tattooing, is one of the Museum’s finest pieces, admired for the complex decorative patterns carved skillfully into its surface. The first kakaparaga funerary mask to have left Papua New Guinea, one of many striking masks in the collection, invites visitors to consider the movement of art objects through the world—especially the problematic history of trade and exchange that brought this and similar pieces to the United States. Arts of the late 20th century are also represented in the collection. Fernando Cueto Amorsolo’s Man with Rooster (1948), on view in the MFA’s Arts of the Pacific Gallery, is one of the only paintings by Amorsolo, a master of Filipino modernism, exhibited in the United States.