The Sacred, Out of Context

Precipitation for an Arid Landscape—which grew out of research Gala Porras-Kim conducted during her time at Radcliffe, when she was the 2019–2020 David and Roberta Logie Fellow—presents new work that explores how sacred objects continue to perform their original functions once they enter museum collections and are subject to institutional paradigms of classification, conservation, and display.

Porras-Kim was drawn to Radcliffe because it enabled her research-focused approach to art making—and for its proximity to the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, whose collections she was interested in, specifically items dredged from the Sacred Cenote of Chichén Itzá, a Maya site in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.

With the help of Radcliffe’s curator of exhibitions, Meg Rotzel, Porras-Kim partnered with museum staff to develop the exhibition. This video, our magazine’s first-ever digital feature, serves as an introduction to art at the Institute as well as this body of work, which has been making art-world headlines since it began its multisite debut. Through the commentary of Rebecca Mendoza Nunziato—an MDiv candidate at Harvard Divinity School and summer 2022 fellow in pre-Columbian studies at Dumbarton Oaks who identifies as Chicana—we also learn more about the impact of Porras-Kim’s artwork, which manages to imbue these sacred objects with new life by once again recontextualizing them. 

Precipitation for an Arid Landscape is on view through June 30, 2022, in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, in Byerly Hall. Other installments were on view at Amant, in Brooklyn (in collaboration with KADIST), November 20, 2021–March 17, 2022, and Gasworks, in London, January 27–March 27, 2022. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is also showing her work through July 24, 2022.