Sherwin Rivera Tibayan
Ate, from the Balikbayan series, 2025
Empty cardboard international shipping box and 2-inch archival white artist tape
Courtesy of the artist

This work is part of the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

Like many Filipino Americans, Sherwin Rivera Tibayan grew up around balikbayan boxes. The practice of boxing up gifts for family and friends in the Philippines became an entrenched feature of the diaspora in the 1980s as more Filipinos made the journey abroad. When his parents decided to return home after thirty years, he watched them tape up their belongings in the same boxes. “I began to understand a deeper, melancholy truth to this practice: maybe they never wanted to leave. Economic insecurity meant they couldn’t afford to stay; economic success meant they could afford to return.”

Now he uses the same taping process to repurpose balikbayan boxes as museum plinths, placing these signs of transience inside the context of a museum—an institution that tries to imbue objects with stable, lasting value. He writes: “My hope is that the space preserved inside each box has room enough for each of us to imagine and fill it with the ideas and feelings we have about longing (for home, for a person), belonging (to a community, to a family), and belongings (all the objects we give and receive).”