California Institute of the Arts alum Gala Porras-Kim (Art MFA 2009) was named by Teresa Heinz and the Heinz Family Foundation as one of nine recipients of the 29th Heinz Awards.

The awards, announced on Tuesday, Sept. 17, annually recognize a select group of outstanding individuals and their contributions to the arts, the economy and the environment. Porras-Kim, one of the winners of the 2024 Heinz Award for the Arts is an interdisciplinary artist who will receive a $250,000 unrestricted cash award.

According to the Foundation, Porras-Kim was recognized for her work “spanning drawings, sculptures and installations that challenge institutions to reassess their role as stewards of history and culture.” The artist often asks collecting museums to consider the intentions, ownership and original context of an artifact.

“I often approach a project by paying close attention to the practical limits of institutional policies, where the logic of conservation and registration often breaks down. My work with these institutions aims to recognize that in the same way they form the understanding of objects in their collections as historical, these objects also redefine the places and people that interact with them depending on their past,” said Porras-Kim in the Heinz press release.

The artist’s work is part of the public collections of a number of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles | Los Angeles County Museum of Art | Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France; and the Tate Modern, London.

Porras-Kim’s current exhibitions include A Hand in Nature at the MCA Denver and Rituals of the Everyday at the Collegium in Arevalo, Spain.

The awards were established in 1993 by Teresa Heinz to honor the memory of her late husband, U.S. Senator John Heinz. Honorees are chosen for their work and accomplishments that will endure and make a lasting impact. Individual artists, notes the Foundation, “must have compiled a body of work that displays artistic excellence and is a reflection or expression of, or that in some way, enhances the human experience.”