As it is with life, it is with museums.  Running from one important exhibit to the next I stumbled upon something infinitely more engaging.  In a first floor hallway, stretched between gift stalls, a temporary installation of modern artworks that take their inspiration from African masks.  There are the predictable pieces – like Man Ray’s “Noire et Blanche” – and there is the work of two amazing contemporary sculptors from Benin, Romauld Hazoume and Calixte Dakpogan.  Both men make mixed media assemblages from found objects.

Dakpogan’s work is a more abstract and lyrical – and rather loosely tied to notions of the mask.  Hazoume’s work is more mask-like, more political, and more linked to traditional West African forms.  Many of his pieces at the Met, like the one above, make use of the plastic jerrycans used to carry gasoline, illegally, into Benin from Nigeria, and then left there to litter streets.  If the political overtones aren’t immediately apparent to an American viewer, their artfulness is.  The masks have an astute visual wit.  Who except Picasso would look into the bottom of a stained plastic jug and see a face?  With some slits and some cowrie shells the sculpture is complete.  I remember an art history professor in college explaining that Picasso wasn’t interested in African sculpture because he was interested in Africa, but because he saw in it an explosive formal freedom.  That freedom is still there.

The American photographer Phyllis Galembo is especially interested in costumes.  She’s traveled through West Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean to document people dressed for ceremonies and celebrations.  And she collects vintage American Halloween costumes.  Her new book, “Maske,” surveys work from the past twenty-five years.  At first glance the color photographs fall somewhere between ethnography and art photography.  Although they have rich documentary value they’re highly composed.  Galembo crops images so that the figures fill the frame, with minimal depth, and depicts colors with a bright, crayon-box immediacy.  Her work isn’t troubled by the post-colonial tensions that Irving Penn’s portraits of Africans are, or the complications of subjectivity that Diane Arbus’ are.  Galumbo faces those she’s photographing simply; she serves them well.

The pictures are arresting.  (I’m tempted as I never have been before to bust out of this format and post more than one.)  There’s something uncomfortable about looking so closely at people whose faces are covered, because we want to know who they are.  And the clothing is mesmerizing.  It’s been executed with a couture-like purity of vision and technical finesse.  There are people here that I won’t forget: two men dressed like trees, a group of boys slathered with martian-green and blood-red body paint, three men in head-to-ankle striped, knit bodysuits.  In these photographs appearances go deep.