One of the best known artist interventions in a museum is James Luna’s Artifact Piece, which was first performed at the San Diego Museum of Man in 1987, and then again at The Decade Show in New York in 1990. Luna, a Luiseño artist, lay almost naked in a display case filled with artifacts in order to challenge representations of Indigenous peoples in museums and the narratives that accompanied those representations, which suggested that Indigenous people and cultures were dead. The objects in the case included Luna's favorite books and music, his divorce papers, his university degree, photos, and other mementos, alongside labels describing the scars on his body and how he had acquired them. The work was critically acclaimed for its challenge of conventional narratives of Indigeneity and Indigenous experience. A few years later, two artists – Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco – developed a traveling performance art piece called The Couple in the Cage: Two Amerindiens Visit the West that reflected on the treatment and representation of Indigenous peoples in colonial contexts, and was performed in many different spaces, including Covent Gardens, the Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, the Australia Museum, and the Field Museum.
