When I first began reading about Gala Porras-Kim’s work, I was struck by how quietly it asks for attention. There is nothing flashy or declarative about her practice. Instead, it unfolds slowly, almost patiently, asking us to pause and reconsider the systems we often take for granted—museums, archives, and the institutional frameworks that claim to preserve history. Gala’s work doesn’t reject these spaces outright. Rather, it questions them from within, with care and precision.
Gala is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections—objects that have often been removed from their original contexts and reclassified according to Western systems of knowledge. Her work proposes new ways of recognizing the layered meanings and functions these objects carry, particularly when they have been separated from the environments, rituals, or belief systems that once gave them life. In 2025, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, recognizing the originality, depth, and significance of her artistic approach.
What makes Gala’s work especially compelling is her refusal to treat objects as inert or silent.
What makes Gala’s work especially compelling is her refusal to treat objects as inert or silent. Instead, she approaches them as things that still remember—not in a nostalgic sense, but in ways that complicate how we understand preservation, care, and ownership.
Questioning the Authority of the Museum
Much of Gala’s practice examines how museums classify, conserve, and interpret the objects in their care. These systems are often presented as neutral or objective, yet Gala reveals how deeply subjective (and sometimes extractive) they can be. Her work gently exposes the gaps between an object’s institutional identity and its original purpose, asking viewers to sit with that dissonance rather than resolve it.
In her 2016 exhibition Reconstructions at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Gala worked with fragmented objects of unknown origin drawn from the Fowler Museum at UCLA. These were not complete artifacts with clear labels or timelines, but partial remains: textile fragments, pottery shards, pieces that resist easy categorization. By placing these fragments alongside her own drawings and sculptural elements, Gala encouraged viewers to reflect on how meaning is constructed, and how much uncertainty is often hidden behind museum authority.
What resonates with me here is her comfort with incompleteness. Rather than forcing coherence, Gala allows ambiguity to remain visible. The fragments are not “fixed” by interpretation; instead, they are given space to exist as unresolved, prompting a more humble and attentive form of looking.
Care as an Ongoing Relationship
One of Gala’s most profound projects, Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021–23), focuses on artifacts recovered from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. These objects were originally placed in the cenote as ritual offerings to the Maya rain god, Chaac, and remained submerged in water for centuries. In the early twentieth century, they were dredged from the cenote and transported to museums in the United States, where they were preserved in dry storage—a condition entirely opposed to their original environment.
Rather than attempting to return these objects physically, Gala approached the question conceptually. She created a sculpture using copal resin mixed with dust and residue from the cenote offerings held in museum storage. Crucially, the work requires exhibiting institutions to bring the sculpture into contact with local rainwater. Preservation, in this context, becomes an active, ongoing relationship rather than a static act of control.
What I find especially moving about this work is how it reframes care. It suggests that stewardship is not about freezing objects in time, but about acknowledging their histories and adapting our methods to honor them. Gala’s intervention is subtle, yet it fundamentally shifts how we think about responsibility.
Letting the Past Move
In more recent work, Gala has expanded her inquiries to include materials from the natural world. For A Hand in Nature (2024), she released molecules trapped in 8,000-year-old glacial ice cores into the gallery space, allowing ancient air to mingle with the present. These ice cores had been deaccessioned from the National Science Foundation, and Gala’s gesture raised quiet but profound questions: What does it mean to preserve something? And what does it mean to let it go?
There is something deeply poetic (and deeply unsettling) about the idea that air itself can be an artifact. The work resists permanence and instead emphasizes circulation, change, and loss. It reminds us that history is not something we simply store away, but something that continues to move through us.
Why Gala’s Work Matters
Gala lives and works between Los Angeles and London, and her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Despite this global reach, her work never feels distant or impersonal. It is grounded in attentiveness—to objects, to histories, and to the people whose stories are often marginalized within institutional spaces.
What stays with me most about Gala’s practice is her insistence on slowing down. In a cultural moment that often prioritizes immediacy and certainty, her work asks us to sit with complexity and acknowledge what we cannot fully know. It challenges us to reconsider our roles not just as viewers, but as participants in the ongoing shaping of history.
What stays with me most about Gala’s practice is her insistence on slowing down.
The MacArthur Fellowship recognizes Gala’s innovative approach, but it also honors something quieter: her generosity as a thinker and artist. She trusts viewers to engage deeply, to question assumptions, and to listen closely. In doing so, she reminds us that the past is not fixed, and that how we choose to care for it matters.
Congratulations, Gala Porras-Kim!
© Barbara Tupova (3/20/26)—Special for FF2 Media®
EDITOR’S NOTE: FF2 Media is proud to post Barbara’s profile of Gala in honor of Women’s History Month!
LEARN MORE / DO MORE
Read Gala Porras-Kim’s MacArthur Foundation profile.
Watch the MacArthur Foundation video featuring Gala discussing her practice.
Explore Gala’s work through Commonwealth and Council Gallery.
Learn more about Precipitation for an Arid Landscape via the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
EDITOR’S NOTE: FF2 Media is proud to post Maggie’s profile of Gala in honor of Women’s History Month!
Photo Credits: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
High-resolution photos of all MacArthur Fellows — in this case Gala Porras-Kim — are available for download, including use by media, in accordance with their copyright policy.
