Modern people, ancient masks: Troy Jones explores cultural links in ‘Echoes of the Diaspora’

“Untitled (Lounging)” is part of Troy Jones’ “Echoes of the Disapora” exhibition at The Morris Museum in Morris Township.

At the peak of his popularity and influence, Kanye West frequently wore a mask onstage. In the hook to his signature song “Mask Off,” Future described taking his mask on and off. Drake advanced masked in the video to “Toosie Slide.” Across the sea, U.K. drill rappers rarely remove their masks; here in New Jersey, Mach-Hommy never appears without a face covering. MF Doom wore his supervillain mask, Eminem donned a “Jason” mask and, through tricks of light and photography, Billy Woods seems to use the entire city as a mask.

This practice helps to explain why “Echoes of the Diaspora” at The Morris Museum in Morris Township feels as familiar as it does. People don’t tend to don masks in social and domestic settings, but the subjects of Troy Jones’ portraits in oil do. Though some of the masks are fearsome, the men and women wearing them are relaxed, convivial and welcoming. We can’t see their faces, but in no way are they hiding from us. They are inviting us into their living rooms, and doing it in a way that reassures us that they don’t mind being watched, admired and emulated. The mask is as essential to their wardrobe, and their outward-facing identities, as their clothing, jewelry and hairstyles.

“Leisure Time,” by Troy Jones.

Curator Bryant Small places these pieces in the context of the pan-African tradition of mask-wearing — and that conversation between paintings and masks is a lively one. Small dips into the museum’s collection of African masks, pulls out some doozies, mounts them between Jones’ canvases, and turns their unflinching faces toward viewers. Like the oil paintings, the masks radiate specificity that transcends anonymity.

Individual personality is not subsumed or obscured by the African mask. Instead, the face coverings promise the wearer immersion in a ritual that links him to a community of ancestors and spirits. By decking out modern people in ancient masks, Jones is affirming the relevance of African traditions of transcendent artistry and representation to those of us who are an ocean removed from the cultures that designed these shamanistic artifacts.

Jones is also up to something else. He is situating these mask-wearing individuals within another tradition: hip-hop. His characters dress, pose and gesture in a manner that video-watchers, concert-goers and magazine-readers ought to recognize immediately. The easy swagger, pride, freshness, upward social mobility and outward projection of power and personality that accompanies hip-hop is present in all of these pieces. Even the mask-wearing itself isn’t out of line with contemporary hip-hop presentation.

Many of the fashions echo older African-American traditions, too, including suits that echo the horn-spiked sauciness of the Jazz Age and the summer’s day looseness of the golden age of disco. But Jones was born in 1974. He grew up alongside hip-hop, and its alphabet of symbols and associations is part of the visual language he uses. “Echoes of the Diaspora” draws connections between hip-hop style and practice, African religion and ritual, and daily life in the United States. In so doing, Jones isn’t merely linking hip-hop to African culture. He is tethering ordinary American existence to African culture, too.

“Rest Assured,” by Troy Jones.

His eye for textural detail and playful juxtaposition helps. In “Rest Assured,” two masked men sit together on an upholstered sofa in a wallpapered living room. Signs of casual opulence and fashion consciousness are visible all over the painting: golden necklaces and jeweled rings, crisp suits and sharply fitted shirts, camouflage pants, a manicured beard and sculpted dreadlocks visible at the fringes of the face covering. One man rests his arm on his friend’s shoulder, tips his head at a slightly conspiratorial angle, and lets his hand hang loosely in the middle of the frame. They are very close together, and they are comfortable with their proximity to each other. The intimacy of the image stops just short of eroticism. So expectant is their pose — and so gentle their eyes through the horizontal slats of their face coverings — the African artifacts slung around their jowls don’t even seem all that startling.

They are dramatic, though. One, with long, erect, conical ears and a nose like a torpedo, evokes a jackal, and the other, round and decorated with beetle-black ovoid shapes, is simply alien. Their wearers might live an unremarkable, successful American life, but the connection with their African heritage and African tradition is deep and indelible. Jones is sensitive to the totemic spirits that run, invisibly, right behind their eyes. He has brought them to the fore, and bestowed upon his subjects the camaraderie of a pair of creative partners in a studio listening to the playback.

“Pinstripes,” too, is all confidence and big-city chic. The masked man in the portrait poses like a model in front of the camera, with one hand in the pocket of his blue buttoned-up suit. His yellow tie matches his flamboyant trench coat and the laces on a pair of Nikes that he has kept fashionably untied. He is absolutely, unashamedly flossing, showing off his sharp threads just as a rapper might. Even his African mask is a flex. It is ringed with cowrie shells — and cowrie shells, in West Africa and elsewhere, were currency.

“Ice Cold,” by Troy Jones.

“Ice Cold” is the austere version: another man with thumbs tucked in his waistband, shirt buttoned up to the base of his long neck, slim shoulders and chin squared, and decked out in a white suit from the top of his head to his thighs. His mask is less ornate than those worn elsewhere in “Echoes of the Diaspora,” but it is certainly expressive. Its eyes are deep-set and narrowed, its nose is a snub, and its mouth is bent in a disapproving frown. In its volatile combination of toughness and implicit threat, with a desperate need to be looked at and deemed impressive, everything about this pose is pure hip-hop.

As is true for other “Diaspora” pieces, the human figure at the center of “Ice Cold” is painted naturalistically, with attention to detail, shading, shadows, the soft folds of commercial fabric, and the hard sheen of the wooden masks. Often, Jones will set his characters down against a background of thick, swirling paint that bunches and streaks like meringue. This, too, feels like a legible visual metaphor. No matter how turbulent the world around them might be, the subjects of “Echoes of the Diaspora” are self-possessed, self-contained, and in no danger of dissipating in the storm.

Jones renders their bodies lovingly, capturing the muscles in their arms, their thick, prominent weightlifter’s veins, their powerful digits and their artfully unruly hair. The masked star of “One Love” pats his pectorals with an outstretched hand, showing off his bracelet, his expensive watch, and his Louis Vuitton T-shirt. Long hair cascades down his back and a gold chain hugs his skin with proprietary energy. His face covering is all angles and action: the eyes slant, the lines of the nose end in three dagger points, the mouth is a raised rectangle with pursed lips, and the chin is long and tufted like a pharaoh’s. Here is a superhero in designer clothes — one who knows that a man of wood, shells and spirit one-ups a man of steel.

And just when it seems that Jones is getting carried away with all the natty tailoring, exquisite threads, and the stances reminiscent of The Source magazine in its heyday, he grounds his work in sociopolitical specificity. The “One Love” subject stands in front of a wallpaper pattern that could have come from a Victorian dressing room — except Jones has dotted it with miniature red, black and green Pan-African flags. The Motherland, it seems, is everywhere: the ground of erudition and a running subtext to all things.

“Modern Day Griot,” by Troy Jones.

In “Modern Day Griot,” Jones shoots the works, introducing us to a tribunal of masked men in a sitting room filled with cosmopolitan hallmarks of culture. One character has an African musical instrument at his feet. Another carries a book. They are dressed spectacularly, and in a manner that takes them straight out of time: vintage suits with big buttons, bow-ties and pocket squares, jaunty hats, well-creased slacks, flowers in lapels.

They are the keepers of genealogies and relayers of stories from across oceans and centuries, guardians entrusted with the flame of culture.

In a gesture of trust and friendship, one of them lifts his mask to show us the face behind the face. He is an ordinary man swept up in an extraordinary tradition, and he is looking right at you.

Troy Jones’ “Echoes of the Diaspora: A Study in Style, Culture and the African Mask” can be seen at The Morris Museum in Morris Township; the exhibition’s closing date has not been announced yet. Visit morrismuseum.org.

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