Gala Porras-Kim, 228 Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum, 2021. Photo: © Gala Porras-Kim Gala Porras-Kim watched as a ceiling vent leaked rainwater onto her sculpture, a honey-colored slab laid across a platform the length of a guitar. She was standing in the largest gallery at Amant, a new arts center in industrial East Williamsburg, where her first New York solo show was set to open on November 20.
Gala Porras-Kim. Photo: Audrey Min Museum collections are invariably built from the spoils of colonization and conquest. Anyone following news about the museum world knows there’s concerted pressure on them to restitute these looted objects — and more museums in the U.S. and Europe are starting to heed the call. Porras-Kim said her work aligns with this increasingly vocal push for restitution, but she doesn’t take an explicitly activist stance.
Porras-Kim’s show at Amant, with the slab of copal in the foreground. Photo: Iwan Baan It helps that she’s good at convincing museums to let her rummage around in their collections. For the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial in 2016, she borrowed artifacts from the UCLA collection that lacked identifying data, then remixed them into replicas that guessed at their original function.
At one such church, he sent Porras-Kim to find the reliquary and retrieve what he said was a saint’s pinkie toe. Years later, he admitted that the relic was a chicken toe, planted for her to find. She was shocked. “I really believed it, and then found out it was all a construction,” she said, sitting across from me at a fold-up table in the midst of her half-installed show. “That was the moment where I was like, is anything real? Then I began thinking about what validates an object.
When Harvard opened applications for a 2019 fellowship at Radcliffe, Porras-Kim sent a proposal asking for access to the collection and got in. The result is seven monumental drawings she made there called Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum, now displayed at Amant in the same gallery as her water-soaked copal. In these photorealistic drawings, each six feet square, an array of objects like gold discs, jade necklaces, and ceramic vessels are shown lined up on shelves.
People often ask if her work is a form of protest against the hoarding of ethnographic objects, or a way of advocating for change. Porras-Kim insists she’s not proposing solutions. This nonpartisan approach keeps her message from being oversimplified for the sake of an agenda, said curator Ruth Estévez: “It’s more sincere, more real than just a black-and-white statement, like, this is what should be done.
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