Sherman Beck USA, b. 1942

Ancestors (1998) belongs to Sherman Beck’s Mask series, also referred to as his Ancestor series. In this piece, we see images of traditional African masks juxtaposed with the image of a contemporary Black man’s face. Throughout this series, Beck sets portraits of African masks and actual human faces afloat in colorful fields of abstract forms and patterns. The series ranges from the highly figurative to the totally abstract, and is inspired in part by the poem “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, which begins, “We wear the mask that grins and lies.”