The figures below, nkisi, mnkisi, were created by master sculptors under ritual supervision. 

Bantu ethnic group. Speakers of Kicongo. 

Watershed of the River Congo. 

They were made of wood, resin, cowrie shell, animal hide and hair, ceramic, plant fiber and pigment. 

Nearly always male; the female mnkisi were deemed less aggressive (efficacious).

 

 

Nkisi N’kondi: Mangaaka, Republic of Congo or Cabinda, Angola, Chiloango River region, Kongo Peoples, Yombe group, 19th century; wood, iron, resin, ceramic, plant fiber, textile, pigment. 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

 

 

Sacred substances were hidden in the interior of these figures. It was these substances which empowered the figures. 

 

 

Mnkisi were designed to be powerful protectors of their supplicants.  They brought on illness and ill luck to those who disturbed them. 

Every aspect of their manufacture and design and materials had meaning. 

They had four primary functions: to project power, to enforce order, to heal and to protect their owners. 

Each nail bored into this wood represented a contract to be honoured or a wrong to be avenged. The nail would be removed once the issue was resolved.

 

Mnkisi 

 

 

Nkisi, 19th century, Kongo Peoples; wood, iron, glass, terracotta, shells, cloth, fiber, pigment, seeds, beads

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

 

 

Nkisi n’kondi, 19th century, Lower Zaire River region (Kongo); late 19th c.;wood, iron, terracotta, shells, pigment. University of Pennsylvania Museum

 

 

 

The Mangaaka were the most potent category of the mnkisi. 

They were differentiated by the power vested in them: the greatest possible.

 

Photos of Mangaaka were taken at an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, NY, in the winter of 2015; and from its website.

 

 

 

These figures often lean forward from their waists up in a pose of threatening dominance. 

 

 

Nkisi, Angola or the Democratic Republic of the Congo; wood, iron, glass, terracotta, shells, cloth, fiber, pigment, seeds, beads

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

 

 

 

For the people of the Congo basin and – surprisingly – for their Western colonizers, adventurers, missionaries, and businessmen, the Mangaaka represented the most influential defensive instrument created in the second half of the 19th century to deal with the continuous, violent incursion of foreigners into the Congo Basin.

 

 

 

The prize was – and remains – the very rich resources of the lower Congo basin.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These figures were desacralized before they were handed over to foreigners for confiscation: sacred substances inside them were removed.

 

 

 

 

Fewer than 20 of the Mangaaka made in colonial times are extant today so thorough was their destruction. They are under glass in museums outside Africa. (The French government has begun the return of such objects).

 

 

 

 

Power figure (Nkisi nkondi), late 19th to mid-20th century; wood, glass, iron, pigment, cloth, plant fiber, horn nails.

Kongo central province, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington, DC

 

After colonial times, local political elites have joined in the pillage of the countries of the Congo basin. 

Just as the powers of surrounding countries have contributed for their own reasons to its destabilization and ungovernability.

 

 

 

 

 

The local and long-distance blow-backs of this ghastly history continue to envenom the world to this day.

 

 

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Downstream: a manifestation  of the mnkisi in the history of African American Art

 

 

Memory Jug, 1900-1930, earthenware, putty, nails, scissors, pipes and other found objects. 

Maker unknown. Southern US. Philadelphia Art Museum.

 

 

The museum notes that memory jugs do not date before 1900 but are thought to have been inspired by objects remembered by members of the population which was formerly enslaved in the American South.

It is not known whether these are grave markers or memorials.

 

 

 

Jack Whitten, 1939-2018, American 

 

Jack Whitten escaped the violence of the struggle for civil rights in the deep South by going to New York.  He finished college there.  He visited both Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums often. 

 

And subsequently drew from the mnkisi  he found there for his own sculptural work.

 

He changed the meaning of the nails bored into wood of the mnkisi.

 

These sculptures he made almost entirely on the Greek island of Crete which he began visiting with his Greek-American wife in 1969.

 

He summered in a village in Crete from 1974 onwards; and learned to carve from local artisans.

 

These works are a private exploration of themes dear to the artist’s thinking:

our line of descent, marriage;  miscegenation; the memory of our kin; our natural environment; the evolution of our technology.

 He consented, not long before he died, to their exhibition.

 

That the first work in which Jack Whitten incorporated nails is dedicated to Malcolm X is probably not a coincidence. 

 

Malcolm X remains an influential figure; a man so feared for his charisma, his eloquence and autonomy, his fearlessness and single-minded focus, that he was assassinated. 

 

A man also, who in his long spiritual journey, crossed numerous boundaries to arrive, at the Hajj, at an acceptance that our differences are superficial; and that we are one.

 

 

 

Homage to Malcolm, 1965, American elm, partly stained, coiled wire, nails, mixed media.

Jack Whitten, 1938-2018, American.   Estate of the artist; on view at the Metropolitan Museum in 2018

 

 

 

The Afro-American Thunderbolt, 1983-84, black mulberry, copper plate, nails.

Jack Whitten, 1938-2018, American.   Estate of the artist on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2018.

 

 

 

 

Valerie Maynard, American, 1937-2022

 

 

Mourning for Maurice, 1970, wood iron nails.

Valerie Maynard, 1937-2022, American. Baltimore Museum of Art

Maurice was a close friend of the artist. He died in a car accident.  For the artist, the nails represent Africans brought to the North American mainland to be enslaved from 1619 onwards.

 

 

 

Melvin Edwards, American born 1937

from the Lynch Fragments: steel assemblages of found objects welded together. MOMA, NY

 

 

Chitungwiza, 1989

 

Katutura, 1986 

 

Sekuru Knows, 1988

(Sekuru is a Shona word for elder or grandfather)

 

 

Born in Texas, the sculptor moved after secondary school to Los Angeles for college and work; and in 1967 to New York for the sake of his art.

 

I have not found specific reference to the artist’s knowledge of the mnkisi; but the artist frequented NY’s museums and became a friend and collaborator of a number of African American artists working in NY. 

 

He certainly would have known Jack Whitten who was his exact contemporary and who had preceded him only by a few years in his own move to New York.

Melvin Edwards is best known for his long series called ‘Lynch Fragments’. 

At first, in the 1960s, the artist was responding to racial violence in the US; and in the 1970s, to American involvement in the Vietnam War.   

 

These three creations date to the 1980s when Edwards began to pay homage to friends, collaborators, people whom he admired; and to commemorate his travels in Africa. 

These are every-day objects welded together: chains, nails, padlocks, knives, tool parts, farm implements, wedges,  and other detritus.

Each piece is roughly the size of a human head and they are hung at eye level.  It is difficult to evade them.

 

 

 

Renée Stout, American born 1958

 

The artist first saw an nkisi when she was 10 and was visiting the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. The image and its possibilities must have seized her mind because she has made a life-size cast of her own body as an nkisi. 

 

In the cavity in her stomach is a box with delicate dried flowers and a photo of a baby. The baby represents “the power of the spirits, the innocent power of an infant and the artist’s ancestral African heritage”.   The stamp is from Niger.

She has transferred the power and functions of the nkisi to African American women; strong women of her family and of others.

 

 

 

“Fetish #2,” 1988, mixed media (plaster body cast).

 

 

 

 

Alison Saar, American born 1956

 

In the sculpture immediately below, Alison Saar is explicitly recognizing the mnkisi.  The nails represent both the good and evil of technology.

The second sculpture is one of several in which the artist has nailed vintage tin panels together to create figurative art.  Here to hail the survival and strength of a woman.

 

 

Untitled , 1989; w0od, iron, tin
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

 

 

 

 

Of strong, robust constitution, 2000, wood, metal, ceiling tin and chain. 

Alison Saar, American born 1956.  Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia

 

 

 

 

Nick Cave, American born 1959

 

Furball :  the fur which accumulates in the gut of cats from their habit of self-grooming; the fur is often expelled in a matted ball.

 

 

 

Furballs #1, #2, #3, c. 1995; hair, twine, nails.

Nick Cave, American born 1959.  Philadelphia Art Museum

 

 

These creations refer to race in north America pointing to a physical distinction between black and white Americans.

 

Their physical  and psychological intimacy is more than 400 years old;

but their differences have been marked as legally and sociologically defining by reason of  the variations of certain physical characteristics, extended by continuing vile racism to all kinds of other characteristics;

as though they – black and white Americans – are not members of a single worldwide race whose bodies, souls, and spirit, function, in every human detail, identically.

 

 

 

Furballs #2, 1995, hair, twine, nails.

Nick Cave, American born 1959.  Philadelphia Art Museum

 

 

 

Furballs #3, c. 1995, hair, twine, nails.

Nick Cave, American born 1959.  Philadelphia Art Museum

 

 

 

I suppose it was the unaccustomed juxtaposition of nails and hair,

hair being something so soft, unthreatening, familiar and intimate, that translated into a sensation of personal violence, dread and of the threat of imminent death.

 

I thought of the Mangaaka and their hard, hard fate, continuing for their  people;

 

and of minority peoples in North America in the ever pursuit of their own happiness.