Decades ago, in the early 1990s, when the annual Día de Muertos exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Pilsen was still new, Cesáreo Moreno, now chief curator, would get calls from Chicago teachers: “They would want to know if it was OK to take children. They would want to know if it was an adult thing — I think the word ‘dead’ tends to throw people when they learn about Day of the Dead. Maybe still does.”
And yet, decades later, the holiday and its ancient traditions for remembering friends and family who died — all of which is actually part of a month-long observance leading to Nov. 1 and 2 — has gained such a footing in this country that Target now has a Día de Muertos holiday section. So do Michaels and World Market and Walmart and Kohl’s. Amazon will sell everything you need to make an ofrenda, the homemade altars at the heart of any Días de Muertos, assembled to honor loved ones. Even Lego now offers a version — one side is an ofrenda, the other is a classic sugar skull, known as a calavera.
“The good news is, all these years later, enough people now know the holiday is a celebration of life and memorializing,” Moreno said. “On the other hand, since Disney gave its blessing, the truth is we are now also wrestling with a post-‘Coco’ holiday.” As in, “Coco,” the Academy Award-winning 2017 Pixar movie set during Días de Muertos.
Moreno sighed.
Commercialization was inevitable.
“Mostly now, I guess I just want people to keep Day of the Dead separate from Halloween. I love Halloween. But Día de Muertos is a spiritual remembrance, and very different, and my biggest concern is that it becomes melded into Halloween and that the spiritual aspect is watered down to sell stuff — the way Christmas and Easter already is.”
The irony is, the National Museum of Mexican Art is now hosting its 40th annual exhibition of ofrendas and art made as remembrance (through Nov. 29), and since 1987, it has likely done more than any other Midwest institution to popularize Día de Muertos.
In particular, this tradition of creating an altar, festooned in bright orange marigolds, stocked with a loved one’s favorite foods, adorned in mementos and lined with candles.
Robert Valadez, a Pilsen artist and second-generation Mexican American, now 63, has contributed pieces to half a dozen of the museum’s past Day of the Dead exhibitions, including ofrendas. “But until that first show of altars way back, (ofrendas) were totally new to me. I didn’t know the first thing about them or what they were. Only as I got older did I learn the tradition. I’m not alone — this exhibit has very much been an education.”
Though ofrendas were initially rooted in indigenous Mesoamerican cultures, and later blended in Roman Catholic traditions — the first were likely made more than 3,000 years ago — the practice wasn’t seen regularly in this country until the 1970s and ‘80s, dovetailing with the rise of Mexican immigration and the Chicano movement.
“I was with my grandmother the day she passed,” said Carina Yepez, a Pilsen resident and textile artist whose work deals with family histories and immigration. “She did not observe Días de Muertos, she would not have visited a cemetery or done anything. Still, when I told her I’d make her an altar, and asked if she would visit, she said, ‘Absolutely.’”
Yepez, now in her 40s, didn’t know about ofrendas herself until visiting the ofrenda exhibit. In fact, she first learned of them at 19, working as a tour guide for the museum.
“Basically, the Spanish came to Mexico, and in indoctrinating their own religion (Catholicism), they masked celebrations already happening, so certain traditions fragmented into regions of the country,” she said. The result being, as a child in a Mexican community in Chicago, “You didn’t see a lot of ofrendas.” But as an adult, she was touched by the practice: “We are so conditioned to grieve on our own and not encouraged to mention death; this opens a space to talk about life and grief.” She now creates altars in her home year-round; after hearing her high school prom date died in a motorcycle accident, she made one. She said most of her family now creates them, too.
There is no one way to do this. A traditional version would include three tiers, topped by a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and then candles, yellow and orange marigolds, a dish of mole, a loaf of sweet pan de muerto, a favorite drink, some calaveras, a glass of water — anything to entice the dead to embark on an arduous journey out of the afterlife.
Moreno said the exhibit always tries to showcase how much variety is in the tradition. They always include at least one example of a classic ofrenda, an art-driven ofrenda, and an ofrenda that pays homage to Chicago and Midwestern communities. But there have been altars that also draw heavily on pop culture, altars that spotlight the activism of the deceased; Valadez said that when he was younger and “feeling more pretentious,” he constructed an artsy altar for the exhibition about “the death of humanity by technology.”
With that in mind, we asked a handful of the artists in this year’s show, titled “Where Memory Lives: 40 Years of Día de Muertos,” to explain their visions and inspirations.
“A laundry list of accomplishments”
About a week after Gilberto Cárdenas died in late July, Brookes Ebetsch, a former student of Cárdenas at the University of Notre Dame, now executive director of the Chicago Artists Coalition, called Cesáreo Moreno about honoring her teacher with an ofrenda. He gave her four weeks. Ebetsch, a Wheaton native whose family comes from Mexico, first met Cárdenas when she took one of his classes at Notre Dame, where he had founded the Latino Studies department. And so, one of the many objects on this ofrenda is her old course book, “Introduction to Latinos in American Society.” There is also a Smith Corona typewriter, because he was a scholar; there are several nods to artists, because he and his wife, Dolores Carrillo Garcia, owned one of the largest Latino art collections in the nation; Peet’s coffee cups (his drink of choice); and a Biscoff package — Cárdenas flew so often, he always had stacks of the complimentary cookies.
There are also placards noting the many organizations he worked with, including the Smithsonian, where he was pivotal in creating the National Museum of the American Latino. (Indeed, the National Museum of Mexican Art, which itself had a long relationship with Cárdenas and received many of the works he collected, dedicated the exhibition to him.) “You may wonder why there’s a laundry list of accomplishments on his ofrenda,” Ebetsch said, “but it’s not ‘Look at what he did.’ It’s ‘Here’s who was influenced by him.’” The stars on the wall reference Cárdenas as a north star; meanwhile, above the altar hang photos of Cárdenas with artists, swaying slightly in a gallery draft: “It was important (the ofrenda) not just be traditional but have a level of artist interpretation, since Gil centered artists. (In the photos) are people he touched. When you die, your memory belongs to everyone who was a part of you. I am always connecting to people through people he supported, institutions he made. Death in some cultures is final. The opposite is true here. It’s not static, it’s always moving.”
Message in a sleeping mat
The Chicago artist known as CHema Skandal!, known for his printmaking and use of Latin American graphic design, created this ofrenda for his father, Don Chema, who died at 76 in January. It’s decidedly minimalist, he said, and so every touch is meaningful. The center portrait of his father was drawn with a mix of ink and ground coffee, pointing to his roots in a coffee-growing region of Puebla, near Mexico City. It’s backed by a petate, a traditional handwoven sleeping mat made of palm. “This one came from his village,” the artist said. “Back in the day, the poor there were rolled up in one and buried. My father was buried in a wooden casket. But burying someone in their sleeping mat was thought environmentally friendly, and for the last 20 years of his life, my father was committed to conservation and caring for the land his ancestors left him.”
Stars and planets surrounding his father suggest the possibility of other dimensions, while the woven mask at the base is a link to CHema Skandal! himself, who frequently wears one at art events. The tiny buffalo was a toy that CHema Skandal! found on vacation with his family. That acorn-looking object: a sequoia seed, because his father tended often to trees. The gourd: a calabash, left at the suggestion of the artist’s sister, who worked on environmental projects with their father. Wisps of plastic represent the plastic bags containing whistles handed out last year in Chicago, to alert for the presence of ICE — a nod to “the sense of solidarity my dad left me.” And each of those dots: 76 coffee beans, “representing the 76 cycles that my father lived on this planet.”
An ofrenda made of glass
David Rios’s ofrenda is entirely made of glass. Everything you see here, a triptych approach of three altars, is glass, except for any notes of gold, which are 24 carat. Initially based in the Pacific Northwest, Rios first worked in glass at 12, and rather than attend college, “I moved to Europe, worked in glass factories and got yelled at a lot, but it was a good reminder no matter how good you think you are, you start at the bottom.”
His ofrenda is not intended for any one relative or friend but rather, partly a reflection on what he calls the miracle required to survive a border crossing on foot and partly an “homage to those who don’t make it.” The Virgin at the top, which looks almost sculpted from ice, was a birthday present for his mother. Instead of glass flames, he made marigolds as “eternal flames.” At the right is a red basket, meant as a family offering; the dove on top is “the coming of peace”; the fruits inside are a nod to a grandfather who traveled annually to Florida to pick oranges. On the left is a dish holding rosary beads he uses while he works. Spotted throughout are Mexican candies (a reference to his childhood hanging out at swap meets with his parents) and small black mortars and pestles. The latter represents a tradition shared with siblings and nieces. “I can learn to work with mortar and pestle, but it is something I can never own — it is always passing down.”
A mother’s artwork in her son’s
The first ofrenda in the exhibit is the most traditional, a burst of yellow-orange marigolds, known as cempasuchil, serving as a bed and surrounding several layers of candles and breads and foods, curling upwards into a vibrant gate of fruit and flowers. The altar is a collaboration of sorts, between Oaxacan artist Demetrio García Aguilar and his mother, celebrated Mexican artist Josefina Aguilar, who died in February at 80. She was known for handcrafting poignant, whimsical clay portraits of her neighbors, figurines she continued to sculpt for at least a decade after losing her sight to diabetes. His mother, Demetrio explained, found her success in the 1960s after Vice President Nelson Rockefeller began collecting and displaying her artworks; indeed, his collecting helped Josefina to eventually purchase the property from where she gathered her clay.
When Moreno asked Demetrio for an ofrenda, he decided to incorporate his mother’s actual ceramics, to highlight a “deeper symbolism inherent in our traditions — the anticipation of the days when we can once again share time with our loved ones who have passed on, and who return to visit us in spirit.” So, at the top of the altar sits Josefina’s self-portrait in clay, her billowing blue dress augmented with clay figures of “my nine brothers and one sister, as well as my grandmother,” Demetrio said. Beneath is a clay rendering of the Virgin of Guadalupe (also by Josefina), surrounded by Demetrio’s ceramic rendering of mole and hot chocolate and a glass of milk; beneath that, a traditional Oaxacan sand painting, typically made of sand, seeds and flowers, placed on a stretcher and left at a loved one’s gravesite — a reminder of our impermanence.
This sand painting, however, is set in plaster, and because of rules against open flames in galleries, the incense pot at the base holds a clay fire, wafting smoke made of cotton.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
If you go
“Where Memory Lives: 40 Years of Día de Muertos” continues through Nov. 29 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St.; free, more information at 312-738-1503 and nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org