October 3 through January 31, 2006

Since 1999, the ASU Museum of Anthropology has hosted a Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) Festival Exhibit, in collaboration with the Calaca Cultural Center, in which well-known local chicana/o artists, people from the community and ASU students create unique altarpieces to memorialize the dead.

For this year’s exhibit Room for the Dead, the exhibit curators hope to make the dead feel literally “at home” as they make their annual visit. Participants have created altars out of household furnishings and appliances, such as toaster ovens, medicine cabinets, salt & pepper shakers – in other words, any kind of object that fits into a home setting. The Festival Exhibit Reception was held on October 27th and included live theatre performance, poetry reading and traditional music.

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. Altars this year have been dedicated to, among others, beloved family members, the victims of Katrina, those who perished crossing the US-Mexican border and the artist Posada.

Room for the Dead Exhibit Photos

From the exhibition:

Días de Los Muertos

The Mexican celebration of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, has its origins in the Pre Colombian era. The Mesoamerican people, including Aztec and Maya, conceived of life and death as cyclical. The Cult of the Dead involved acts of reciprocation between descendant and ancestor. Offerings were made to ancestors to ensure future prosperity, creating a mutually beneficial relationship between the dead and the living. The Spanish colonization of Mexico and the introduction of Catholicism resulted in a layering and fusion of religious beliefs. The Day of the Dead celebration as it is known today is a product of this process.

In contemporary Mexico and the Southwest region of the United States, Dia de los Muertos is the annual celebration of the return of the ancestors, who are invited to come back and visit during the first and second of November. People prepare altars with the purpose of sharing the joys of life with family members, friends and loved ones that have passed on. The ways in which altars are prepared vary in each region of Mexico and the United States. The principle elements that are found on altars include the favorite food and drinks of the people who have died, candles, personal objects, pan de muertos (bread of the dead), images of saints, copal (resin) incense, flowers, crosses, water and photographs. If altars are dedicated to children, sweets and toys are included. In some regions, altars are set upon graves in cemeteries and churches.

Yet, if we view this ritual and celebration merely as reflections on the duality of life and death, we lose some of the existentialist threads that are woven into the current practices of the Dia de los Muertos. It involves the transformation of death into something common and familiar, as well as the view of life as tragic and ruled by chance. Hence, “it is not fear of death, but anguish towards life; being conscious of exposure, with insufficient means of defense; a life full of uncertainties and dangers” (Aguilar-Moreno 1998:10). With this honest perspective on the pitfalls of life, also comes the ability to reconcile with the realities of grief, suffering and loss. It is best to embrace wholly the pain of losing a loved one, while at the same time to celebrate the wondrous and chaotic nature of life. This is also the central theme represented in the art of Jose Luis Guadalupe Posada (1851-1913), who produced Calaveras, or epitaphs, that portrayed the energy of life in the face of death. Unlike the traditional European view of the skeleton as a reminder of the fleeting nature of life, according to the artist Diego Rivera, Posada personified death ‘as a skeleton that gets drunk, picks fights, sheds tears and dances for joy’ (Diego Rivera cited by Rothenstein 1989:187).