Mask Making
The Magic of Traditional Mask-Making
The art of mask-making for children enhances emotional intelligence, sparks creativity, and supports language development. Mask-making activities also foster a sense of cultural connection, encourage self-expression, and strengthens problem-solving skills, all of which contribute to their overall growth and well-being.
Mask-Making Preserves Culture
From Kenya to Sri Lanka to Haiti, children revel in the joy of expressing themselves through the mask-making process during our vulnerable children’s mask-making workshops.
Masks and mask-making provide ways for children to explore their personal identities and create new ones! It is play-based learning at its best.
Video of Mask Making Around the World
Teaching Children Mask-Making Preserves Culture
In Haiti, mask-making is a traditional art form associated with indigenous ritual practices.
Thus, when CPI went to Haiti for the first time, we had no intention of teaching kids about masks. They already knew. We hoped, however, they would learn how to make masks from a master – which is what happened. We provided (and continue to do so) practical support so that, once the kids learned the technique, they could get creative. This is play-based learning at its best!
CPi is Training Girls to Become Mask-Makers in Haiti
Our program empowers girls by involving them in this male-dominated field. We’re proud to train and coach girls as Haiti’s first female mask-makers, breaking gender barriers.
Training the Next Generation of Artists
Today, we run mask-making workshops and train a group of talented girls and boys who with our support might become masters of the art form which, in Haiti, is a viable profession. In the end, of course, what matters is that the kids and young adults have a good time, and feel valued and inspired.
Children in Kenya posing before painting of their marks
Boys in Sri Lanka before painting of masks.
Girl in Haiti with the mask she made during 2022 workshop.
Partnering with Local Masters for Cultural Preservation
In Haiti, masks are basic to the public celebration of Carnival (an institutionalized form of play, honored in the rich Haitian culture). This is largely due to the importance of voodoo, where masks can represent demons and the dead. Voodoo permeates civic life, despite the country’s Catholicism. Its rites are commonplace. Didier puts it this way: “We come from Africa. When we make zebra and lion masks, we are remembering Africa. It’s a way to teach the children where we are from.”
Through Didier, we hoped to help these kids recover a sense of normalcy after twin crises (a massive 2010 earthquake and subsequent hurricane) had upended their lives. In Haiti, mask-making is normal. For children, it’s a sort of rite de passage and a prominent feature of the culture at large.
Masks are basic to the public celebration of Carnival (an institutionalized form of play, honored in Haitian culture). This is largely due to the importance of voodoo, where masks can represent demons and the dead. Voodoo permeates civic life, despite the country’s Catholicism. Its rites are commonplace
Mask-Making Workshops: Fostering Creativity and Cultural Preservation
Didier conducts his mask-making workshops in Jacmel, a small city nicknamed “City of Artists.” It holds one of Haiti’s most extravagant Carnivals, where art and performance are indistinguishable. The colors are intense. Every inhabitant (all 40,000), it seems, pays attention to costumes and making masks. Paint, sculpture, singing and dancing – old and new – pour into the streets.
The environment is also vivid and preternaturally green. Water is everywhere. It’s the solvent in paper maché.
Actually, the mask-maker’s medium is simple, mainly newspapers, clay, and glue – cheap, accessible materials readily available. You used what you have; you relied on spontaneous, pick-up ingenuity.
What CPI provides is mainly intangible. We facilitate; we help create the setting where vulnerable children learn about their culture through play-based learning.
The Impact of Mask-Making on Children including Girls!
The experience was and is hugely affirmative. In acquiring a skill embedded in their culture, the children perpetuate the culture and enhanced their sense of what they can achieve. Didier and CPI has included girls in the the mask-making workshops since 2022, and we are proud to guide and train the first generation of female mask-makers in Haiti.
The children create complex objects that fused them to the culture and still allowed them to express their individuality and showcase their talent. In the Haitian context, play is a bridge between the self and history, the self and the world (especially the world of Carnival). Everyone is excited.
ChildsPlay International: Fostering Cultural Preservation
When CPI records local stories, it ensures that local people are involved and that the methods of recording and transcribing are reproducible at the local level. This involves finding and training local apprentices in skills such as film-making and instructing local teachers to pass on to students’ interest in cultural preservation. Students are encouraged to define their own relationship to oral tradition by creating works of art – paintings, puppets, masks, plays – that interpret that tradition and perpetuate it as a living practice. These works of art are also collected and exhibited, enabling the children to see the direct connection of their own creativity to that of the past.
Our mission is to foster greater opportunities for vulnerable children to play, learn, and develop.
