Most of the carved heads were displayed so high atop furniture that I had to stand back to get a good look at them. I had searched for them specifically at the auction house because the website had described them as “Carved Coconut Head Art.”
The images I saw on the web were nothing like the carved coconut heads I’d seen before. Those were more folk art made by people like me who took a knife and started hacking more than carving. There wasn’t much artistry to them, just a wedge of coconut sliced away at angles to provide an outline of a face and then painted with features.
The ones at auction had personality, one even reminded me of Rodin’s “The Thinker.” The other was an angry gorilla, his eyes glaring, his teeth ready for a huge bite out of something or someone.
They were also shellacked, even the pointed tufts of hair that stood rod-straight on their heads.
Their heads did not resemble coconuts. In fact, the entire body of one of them looked like one piece of wood. The auction website did not mention anything else about these works, so I had no idea where they came from or who made them or how they were made.
I tried searching for their likeness via Google and eBay, and found only the typical coconut head carvings. Those made to look like monkey faces were especially prevalent. A few people did something different – making men and pirate faces, tiki bar banks and mug, or dressing up the heads with splashes of color.
I even found a coconut head purse painted dark brown and said to be from the 1970s. Another site used half of the coconut shells, and painted and decorated them to make Mexican folk art masks. Another was selling a head that it said probably dated to the 1930s when Seminole Indians carved them for tourists. And another was selling a flat sun dial that it said was made from a coconut shell.
Most of them seemed to be made for tourists, with a string attached for hanging. They were selling on eBay for 99 cents up to $88.
One southern writer who picked up a few coconut head carvings as a child says they are now collectibles.
Are they collectibles? Certainly, just about everything is collected by someone. I came across a 1991 Rinker on Collectibles newspaper column where a reader asked a question about his/her own collection of coconut head items and if there were other collectors out there like him. Interestingly, Rinker said that he himself was a collector, and warned the writer not to elevate the items to art, but to call them “primitive native folk art.”
The ones at auction would certainly fit that description. They were not high art, but they were pleasurable to look at.
Are you a collector of coconut head items? What’s the allure for you?
