all photos by Randy Batista except where otherwise noted
The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, marked its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015. The museum opened in 1990 with a modest African collection that has grown steadily ever since, with many significant acquisitions in recent years. The collection originated at the University of Florida Gallery, the ancestral institution of the Harn Museum that began collecting African art in the 1960s. Roy Craven, a historian of Indian art and founding director of the University of Florida Gallery, purchased African art and encouraged donations of African art.1
One of the first objects to enter the University of Florida Gallery collection was a Mano deangle masquerade costume donated by Rosemary and Wallace Eugene Manis in 1977 (Fig. 1). Wallace Manis collected the mask in Liberia, where he worked as a botanist for Firestone Plantations Company and noted that...