Ingmars Lindbergs
Director
Lot 54
A Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) Dzunuk'wa mask
9 December 2025, 12:00 PST
Los AngelesUS$30,000 - US$50,000
Ask about this lot
Kim Jarand
Specialist, Head of Sale
A Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) Dzunuk'wa mask
Carved and painted wood, with characteristic pursed lips, prominent eyebrows, narrow and deep eye sockets set with semi-triangular eyes, red ovoids on the forehead, cheeks and as framing devices, two separately carved figures in profile attached at the jawline and flanking the mouth, hair about the upper perimeter, harness leather straps at the interior.
length 12 5/8in, width 11in
length 12 5/8in, width 11in
Footnotes
Provenance
Estate of Martin Wright
Millea Bros Auctioneers, Boonton, NJ, Select: Day 3, May 20, 2022, lot 2342
A Private Canadian Collection
See Hawthorn, Audrey, Kwakiutl, 1967, University of Washington Press, Seattle, WA, p.145, fig. 256, for a similar mask by the same hand. That example, found in the collection of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, (object number A4034), can also be seen online at: https://collection-online.moa.ubc.ca/search/item?keywords=a4034
The Museum's description of the mask includes the following: "Used when giving gifts or cutting a copper (J. Dick, 1966). The most important right of the Dzunuk'wa, is when Kwakwaka'wakw Chiefs wear a special form of the creature - the Gi'kamł or Chief's Mask. At the end of required potlatch obligations, to complete a hereditary Chief's role, the Chief will put on the family's crest representing a male Dzunuk'wa mask called Gi'kamł. It is with this mask that hereditary Chiefs don the Gi'kamł and carry out the intense ceremony of 'Copper-Breaking'."
An essay commissioned by the present owner from Steven C. Brown, former Curator of Native American Art at the Seattle Art Museum, dates the present lot as circa 1860, and provides a comparative analysis between this lot and the example in the collection of the MOA, along with another mask featuring a single attached human figure on the forehead, by a different hand, sold by Sotheby's in the auction of Eskimo And Northwest Coast Art, James Economos Collection, Paris, 11 June 2008, lot 6.
Brown observes "The subject mask is unique among the type, having two profile images attached, one on each cheek. The two figures are clearly relief-carved by the same hand as the Dzunukwa, as they exhibit the same style of eyes, the heavy brow, and red ovoids indented above the brows. The mating surfaces of the Dzunukwa's cheeks and the back side of the figures are flattened off, and a pair of wooden pegs in each figure secure them onto the mask. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the two figures represent wayward children that the Dzunukwa has captured, and which are becoming Dzunukwa."
Another Dzunukwa mask that appears to be by the same maker as the present lot came to market after Brown had completed his essay. Sold by Sotheby's in the auction of Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, New York, 22 October 2024, lot 27. Whilst not incorporating any secondary attached figures, that mask shares the deep close-set triangular eyes and distinctive nostrils seen on this mask.