From across a room, "Lovely Girl" is one unbroken line: a slender body in polished black stone rising three feet four inches. Up close comes the surprise of the head, left raw and pale, with a single opening carved clean through where her face would be.
The Shona people have carved stone since Great Zimbabwe was built around 1200 AD, and when the tradition returned to the world's attention in the 1950s, these works drew comparisons to Picasso and Henry Moore. She belongs to that lineage, carved from the spring stone native to Zimbabwe, and she asks for nothing but a little space and good light.
