Gere or Kran Mask, Côte d'Ivoire

Merton D. Simpson, New York
Martin and Roberta Lerner, New York acquired from the above in April 1965

Cleveland Museum of Art, on loan from May – November 16, 1968
Cleveland Museum of Art, on loan from July, 1970 – March 31, 1971

For many tribes living along the Guinea Coast in West Africa, masks played an important role in maintaining religious, social, and political order. While some masks were made for entertainment and public ceremonies, others, including this expressive mask from the Gere or Kran people of western Côte d’Ivoire, were used in secretive rituals associated with the Poro society, common across many cultures in the region. The main functions of the Poro society were to provide adjudications in questions of justice and to oversee a rigorous initiatory process for boys. As the missionary George Harley notes in his papers on the Poro: “The religious significance of the Poro should be emphasized. Not only are the men supposed to meet the ancestral spirits in the sacred grove; but they conduct rites and sacrifices of a type suggesting the worship of high gods. Though these high gods do not form a pantheon as they do among the semi-Bantu of Nigeria, there is evidence that traces of them appear in the secret ritual within the Poro, perhaps visibly as masked figures” (Harley, “Notes on the Poro in Liberia”, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. XIX, No. 2, 1941, p. 4).

The mask’s refined sculptural form, encrusted sacrificial patina, and tr💝aces of red ochre pigment testify to its great age and use in a ritualistic context. Acquired by Martin and Roberta Lerner early in their collecting careers, this mask was on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art two separate times in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see fig. 1).