About this piece
Arms to her knees, legs like two rods, and her face tipped to the sky.
This walking female stargazer is Dogon, from Mali or Burkina Faso, and contemporary, made of forged iron and copper. Forged figures like this one carry on a long West African tradition of iron sculpture, in which smiths drew out hot metal into slender human forms. A tiny head lifts upward on a thin neck. Very long arms hang parallel to the body, and two straight legs descend side by side into a flared bell of a base. A greenish crust covers it all. It stands 44 inches high and 6 wide.
Nothing up there has told her to stop looking.




