November 4 through December 31, 2004

Since 1999, the ASU Museum of Anthropology has hosted a Días de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) Festival Exhibit, in collaboration with the Calaca Cultural Center, in which local chicana/o artists, community members and ASU students create unique altarpieces memorializing the dead.

This year’s exhibit featured over 40 individual altars. The exhibit theme Visiones Sagradas, Sacred Sights was inspired by traditional traveling altars or cajitas. Taking the form of tryptichs, suitcases and even matchboxes, cajitas have often been used in Mexico during religious pilgrimages. In the North however — where many families have moved from place to place — creating cajitas has sometimes replaced the traditional Day of the Dead visit to the family cemetery.

Los Días de los Muertos is an important celebration among Mexicans and Mexican-Americans that blends Aztec and Roman Catholic rituals and meanings. Los Dias de los Muertos embraces the inevitability of death while celebrating the lives of loved ones who have died.

Past altars have been dedicated to, among others, beloved family members, those who perished crossing the US-Mexican border, the soldiers of Iraq, Cesar Chavez, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, the sun/moon and Frida Kahlo.

Visiones Sagrados Exhibit Photos