This was the last piece I did at The Smithsonian. It was collected during the 1929 sugarcane expedition to Papua New Guinea. It is human skin stretched over an armature of clay, and it was smoked and decorated with paint, shell, bone, and bound up the back with basket weaving. It was considered to represent ideal human form, or the form that humans secretly possess. I was excited to paint it, because I had ordered the 1929 National Geographic, which has a long article about this expedition, and there is an image of this exact head in it, so I really felt like I got to play a part in the history of this object.
