Aside from Halloween, Mardi Gras and news reports of robberies and terrorism, masks don't figure much in contemporary American life. They're everywhere in cultural history, though, from ancient Greek theater to 18th-century French balls and Venetian street life.

A spectacular display of unusual African masks, on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts through Feb. 8, adds another chapter to that story.

"Visions From the Forests: The Art of Liberia and Sierra Leone" is an engrossing display of rare wooden masks plus a modest selection of jewelry, textiles and stone sculpture from the Dan, Mano, Loma, Mende and other communities whose rain forest territory falls roughly within Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire on the West Coast of Africa.

Masks are the exhibition's centerpiece, and their elegant design, fine carving and beautiful polish make them admirable as sculpture. However, it's the explanations of the dances, celebrations, initiation rituals, standards of beauty and character associated with the masks that will make them more than exotic trophies to Westerners.

Organized by the Minneapolis museum, the exhibit includes 75 pieces given to the museum by the late William Siegmann, a Minneapolis native who worked in Liberia from 1965 to 1987, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a museum curator and scholar. The show opened at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., last spring and will travel to the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta after it closes in Minneapolis.

Innovative scholarship

Liberia's American ties date to the early 1800s when freed U.S. slaves resettled there, but much of the country remained isolated, as Siegmann found in 1966 when he discovered that he was the first white man to pass through a coastal region since writer Graham Greene in 1936.

The wooden mask from Liberia shown above was worn by women during special rites. At right, curator Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers pointed out a mask decorated with feathers and monkey tail.

Siegmann helped to establish two Liberian museums including the National Museum in Monrovia, and then to rebuild them after they were looted and destroyed during the civil wars that ravaged the country between 1989 and 2003. Now, tragically, the same area is being devastated by the Ebola crisis.

Although he was a curator of African art at the Brooklyn Museum for 20 years, Siegmann remained a Liberian at heart. "I loved living in Africa and the relationships I developed with people there," he once said in an interview.

Adopted by a Liberian family, he asked that some of his ashes be buried on a riverbank there after his death of cancer in 2011.

"One of the great strengths of Bill Siegmann's collection is that he identified many of the artists," said Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers, the Minneapolis museum's African art curator. "The names of most African artists are unknown [to Westerners] because most collectors didn't write down or even ask about their names. But the Dan people, for example, have a long lineage of artists and remember the names for generations."

Scholars and anthropologists are now busy remedying these oversights and, when possible, explaining how the masks were used. "Visions" begins with a group of palm-sized "passport masks" that had various roles in their owners' lives. They might indicate rank, command respect, offer protection, honor ancestors or, perhaps, provide talismanic connections to the spirit world.

Idealized beauty

To nonspecialist eyes, the show's most impressive pieces are the glossy wooden masks associated with the Sande Society, a yearlong female initiation program that oversees the education and preparation of young women for marriage and adult responsibilities. Their typically secret rituals are conducted in the forests, but the girls and their attendants emerge at various times to sing, dance and display their womanly skills, elaborate hairdos and newly refined beauty.

The features of Sande masks represent idealized beauty, Grootaers said, some with flat or narrow upturned noses, thin lips, high foreheads and cheek scarifications. Some masks incorporate a mix of Muslim, Christian and indigenous symbolism. Cowrie shell carvings are common as marks of wealth and fecundity.

A mask and costume made about 1960 by Ansumana Sona for a Mende girl in Sierra Leone is a stellar example. The dancer's body would have been entirely enveloped in thick cascades of plant fiber that look like tangles of coarse hair. She would peer through narrow eye-slits in the helmet-like mask whose carved crown — decorated with jewels in silver settings — resembles the elaborately ridged, woven and braided hair that was the pride of Mende women.

Elsewhere, the show includes comic masks used by male dancers in entertainments and more somber designs used in initiation ceremonies for young men, funerals, harvest festivals and other occasions. Brass jewelry, stone sculptures, textiles and carved horns and containers complete the exhibit.

Huge horns of carved ivory, smaller "snuff-horn" containers fitted with silver chains and Arabic inscriptions, and a silver fez-style hat garnished with chili-pepper designs testify to the cultural sophistication and refined craftsmanship of the area's artisans.

"These horn ornaments are very rare," said Grootaers. "Bill loved and collected a lot of them."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431