AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

Encounters with an unusual black paint during treatment of Bwa masks in 2000 and 2022 inspired this black paint investigation focusing on Bwa and Mossi masks. This heavy-bodied black paint is used for raised linear designs on tri-color (red, black and white) wood masks depicting hybrid creatures or animals made by multiple cultural groups in the region of Burkina Faso. Several masks in our study were collected directly by the eminent University of Iowa scholar and art history professor Christopher Roy (1947-2019), who worked in Burkina Faso over four decades. In 25 years of treating African objects, one author has encountered various black substances, yet none to-date has resembled the unusual Bwa paint she first noted in 2000 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art. In personal correspondence with Roy about this and in his publications, Roy explained that laborious processing of Acacia nilotica seed pods produced the paint. Later object treatments undertaken in 2022 for the inauguration of the UI Stanley Museum of Art’s (SMA) new building afforded access to the Burkinabè masks collected by Roy and an increased exposure to his scholarship. The distinctive appearance and Roy’s intriguing description of the paint’s derivation led to our collaborative effort to corroborate Roy’s field observations with scientific analysis.

Following Roy’s descriptions, the processing of Acacia nilotica seed pods was recreated in the lab, and the newly created samples compared with paint from the objects. Multiple analytical techniques, including FTIR, py GC-MS, and SEM-EDS, were applied to elucidate the nature and composition of the paint samples and reference material to confirm Roy’s field description. While an array of substances is used to produce the important color black throughout the African continent, the use of Acacia nilotica seed pods for black paint appears to be localized to the Burkinabè. The study of the compelling biographies and materiality of the masks sheds light on a long cultural tradition in Africa’s Western Sudan region.