Dogon Mother and Child Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2020

Title: Mother and Child Figure

Date: 17th–19th century (?)

Geography: Mali

Culture: Dogon peoples

Medium: Wood

Dimensions: H. 21 7/8 × W. 5 × D. 6 1/2 in. (55.6 × 12.7 × 16.5 cm)

Classification: Wood-Sculpture

Credit Line: The Menil Collection, Houston


As the focus of prayers and offerings, Dogon sculptures served as altars that heightened the attention of the divine and intensified spiritual engagement. Help with infertility has been among the most common requests for ancestral intervention. Mother-and-child figures served as visual petitions giving lasting voice to a woman’s fleeting words of prayer that she might generate new life. Artistic renderings of this profoundly held desire have imaginatively explored the nature of the parent-child relationship. None of these derives from artistic precedent; rather, each is a highly personalized and original interpretation of the subject.

Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/778952