In the four months leading up to July 9 toppling of Sri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a protest village formed in Colombo, occupying the capital city’s oceanside park Galle Face Green. Called Gota Go Gama (GGG), a mashup of Sinhala and English words meaning “Gotabaya Go Village,” it became the main gathering site for aragalaya, or the struggle. A space of national imagining, GGG has been shaped by the contributions of artists expressing their frustrations and aspirations as part of a peaceful movement of citizens voicing their dissent. But in the middle of the night on July 21, less than 24 hours after Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the country’s new president, he ordered a military crackdown on GGG.

Sri Lankans have endured a crippling economic crisis, with fuel and food prices skyrocketing. The country’s lucrative tourism industry has taken a major hit since the onset of the pandemic, but it was the mismanagement of resources by the Rajapaksa administration that ultimately fueled this backlash that led to his ouster.

Almost as soon as GGG took root it began to feature the works of visual artists. An art gallery formed and the feminist public art project Fearless Collective erected a mural on a standing wooden flat. Tehani Ariyaratne, the chief operating officer of Fearless, wrote in a recent email that “the sense we got, painting in the art space at GGG, was that art was being used as a powerful medium of resistance and to express the feelings of the protestors at the site.”

While protestors’ anger was reflected in much of the art on view at GGG, the Fearless mural, which was collaboratively painted by local artists, set out to visualize the possibilities of a new country emerging from aragalaya. The mural depicts four figures that embody the qualities the painters want in their leaders, with each displaying a symbol of an attribute: a flower in the hair for compassion, a scale for justice, rice plants for abundance, and a clay oil lamp for mobility. The Fearless artists created a place of hope and joy around the work, which Ariyaratne recalls was intentionally filled with music and laughter.

The Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico has returned to Mexico a collection of antiquities donated to the museum and kept in storage for more than a decade. The group of a dozen artifacts, which include sculptures and figurines with roots in Olmec and Zacatecas Indigenous communities, were donated to the museum in 2007.

Five months ago, the museum discovered the items in storage where they had been for the last fifteen years. An unidentified donor had donated the objects to the museum after originally purchasing them in the 1980s from an undisclosed dealer.

After uncovering the objects, the museum’s researchers located an appraisal from 2007 that labeled the artifacts as “pre-Columbian,’ a descriptor given to some ancient objects produced in Latin American territories before European conquests.

The move has come as advocates have called for cultural institutions to repatriate cultural artifacts with Indigenous roots to their originating countries. The government of Mexico has been making efforts to halt the sales of pre-Columbian artifacts at international auction houses and has made frequent requests for restitution.

More than 5,000 archaeological objects from Mexico have been recovered in the last several years, the Mexican government has estimated.

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