David Sanou—Artistic Choices

Creative Innovation: Artist Choices and Compromise in Burkina Faso

Masquerade artists are driven to show audiences something they have never seen before. They inject fresh ideas, materials, styles, patterns, and iconographic details into existing forms—
sometimes to the point of becoming entirely new masquerade genres. By innovating and updating to suit current conditions, masquerade artists make their pieces relevant—and exciting—to contemporary audiences. They also ensure the artists’ financial success.

For these works, David Sanou incorporated the abstraction of the birdlike Kimi (below left) and the naturalism of honorific Photo Masks (below center) to create a “compromise” genre (below right), which includes pictorial elements in the tall plank of its superstructures and humanlike facial features to honor an individual, but without producing a direct likeness. It is this ability to innovate that has made Sanou such a successful masquerade artist. Patrons from various districts in the city and surrounding towns habitually commission carved masquerade headpieces and other creations from Sanou because his work adheres to regional standards while exhibiting an exceptional degree of refinement and creative ingenuity.