Portfolio: Phyllis Galembo

“Baby Dance of Etikpe, Cross River, Nigeria” (detail), 2004

Many of us go through life wanting to know what’s behind the mask. But for University at Albany art professor Phyllis Galembo, the mask itself is enough.

Galembo’s latest work presents large-scale color prints of the masquerade, a centuries-old costumed ceremony she witnessed in the African nations of Benin, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. Part documentary, part anthropology, part pure visual adventure, Galembo’s new images are the most recent incarnations of her decades-long inquiry into the masks, costumes, and ceremonial garb we humans use to conceal and reveal ourselves. The project has taken Galembo to Brazil, Jamaica, Nigeria, and Haiti, where she photographed Voudoo priests and priestesses in ritual dress—and even became one herself.

Now, her focus is on the revelers of the masquerade, who temporarily surrender their identities in favor of those of the spirit figures they represent. The work is on view in the exhibit “West African Masquerade” at Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery through December 30.

Galembo isolates the masqueraders, individually or in groups of two or three, against an improvised outdoor studio wall. She sets up her medium-format camera and single umbrella light and captures her image before the figures dance away. Their intricate costumes are made of crocheted yarn, wooden masks, and leaves. In some cases, the participants are barely recognizable as human. Only the least perceptible bits of skin allow us to remember that we’re looking at people rather than puppets or dolls. We confront these pictures in all their saturated tropical color as outsiders, privy to moments woven from a culture of strange religious rituals and an intimacy with nature that we don’t experience here.

Roberta Smith, reviewing Galembo in the New York Times, wrote that her images “are both portraits and documents, but their combination of dignity, conviction, and formal power gives them a votive aspect similar to European paintings of saints or kings.”

This latest work seems to have come unmoored from European perspectives. Galembo takes her viewers into exotic places inhabited not by people but by marvelous and mysterious spirits.

—David Brickman