Recently some modern artists have also been interested in creating nkisi of their own, most notably Renee Stout, whose exhibition "Astonishment and Power" at the Smithsonian Institution coupled her own versions of nkisi with a commentary by noted anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey.
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In its earliest attestations in Kikongo dialects in the early seventeenth century it was spelled "mokissie" (in Dutch), as the mu- prefix in this noun class were still pronounced, and was reported by Dutch visitors to Loango as referring both to a material item and the spiritual entity that inhabits it.