Foreign Art, Foreign Land is a project that examines what happens when cultural artifacts are pulled from the places that shaped them and placed behind glass in foreign museums. In Chapter 1, I created life-size cardboard replicas of pre-Columbian and Egyptian objects and set them loose throughout New York City, on sidewalks, in parks, in subway stations. Photographed in everyday spaces, these replicas existed briefly outside the institutional frame, symbolically “liberated” from the museum’s walls. Their presence raised quiet but insistent questions about belonging, ownership, and access: Who gets to see these objects freely? Who has the right to hold them? And what does it mean to encounter them out in the world rather than under controlled museum light?

The next chapters take the project back to where these objects began. Starting in Vietnam and Peru and continuing in Mexico and Costa Rica, I re-stage the replicas in their countries of origin while speaking with archaeologists, educators, collectors, and community leaders.

Their perspectives, combined with my own memories of growing up in Costa Rica, shape the core inquiries of the work: Who determines where an artifact truly belongs? What is preserved, and what inevitably slips away, when heritage is displaced? While the project acknowledges the essential role museums play in conservation, education, and global cultural exchange, it also looks at what preservation cannot hold: the symbolic weight these artifacts carry, the histories of extraction embedded in their journeys, and the absences they leave behind in the communities from which they were taken.

Chapter One: New York

Chapter Two: Vietnam (Coming Soon)

Chapter Three: Perú (Coming Soon)