One of the most celebrated works of African art bears Olokun's name and a controversy attached to it. Among the naturalistic brass and terracotta heads produced at Ife, the ancient Yoruba city regarded as a place of origin in Yoruba cosmology, between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, a particular brass head recovered from a grove dedicated to Olokun came to be known as the Olokun head, prized by art historians for the extraordinary refinement of its casting and its naturalistic facial features, qualities that startled early twentieth century European observers accustomed to assuming such technical sophistication belonged only to societies they considered classical. The German ethnographer Leo Frobenius, visiting Ife in 1910, is widely reported to have attempted to acquire the head, and long standing local tradition holds that Ife custodians substituted an inferior copy to keep him from removing the genuine object, a story that has become a well known episode in the history of African art and its fraught relationship with early European collecting expeditions, though the exact details of the exchange are known mainly through later retellings rather than a fully documented contemporary record.
Whatever the precise truth of the substitution story, the Olokun head remains in Nigeria today and stands as one of the signature works of the Ife bronze casting tradition, evidence that the deity of the ocean's unfathomed depths was, at least at Ife, honored with some of the most technically accomplished sacred sculpture produced anywhere in pre-colonial West Africa, a material record considerably older than any of the diaspora traditions that carry Olokun's worship today.