On the cover of Artforum this month is a remarkable drawing by the artist Gala Porras-Kim: 254 offerings for the rain at the Peabody Museum, 2021, a work that addresses the profane fate of a collection of objects exhumed in the early years of the twentieth century from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and then trafficked into the United States. Porras-Kim is not the first artist to explore the lives of those displaced artifacts that score our shattered pasts, but she is among the most inventive. For more on her unique approach to questions of authenticity and repatriation, read art historian Martha Buskirk’s “The Ethics of Dust” in the March issue.

“Her focus could hardly be timelier, given the increased pressure on museums around the world to repatriate material acquired through means ranging from colonial looting to illicit excavation. Porras-Kim, for her part, has shown a remarkable ability to work her way into the fold, persuading museums to engage with her weighty interrogation of topics such as preservation, context, legal versus spiritual ownership, materiality, and the very act of collecting itself.”