Green-Wood Cemetery will honor Día de los Muertos with a new installation and community altar, “Míctlan,” next month.
File photo courtesy of Rooftop Films
Next month, Brooklyn’s iconic Green-Wood Cemetery will unveil a new artist installation and community altar to mark Día de los Muertos.
Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a revered holiday celebrated in many Hispanic cultures throughout Mexico and Latin America and is deeply rooted in pre-Hispanic tradition and Roman Catholicism. The holiday honors deceased loved ones by inviting their spirits back to the living world for a visit, and with family gatherings, special food and celebrations, and offerings made on an altar, or ofrenda.
Each year, Green-Wood invites an artist to create a community altar for locals to make their own offerings and remember their lost friends and family.
Titled “Mictlán,” the installation was created by local artist Cinthya Santos-Briones. Santos-Briones, a former anthropologist and ethnohistorian, is a visual artist and cultural organizer with roots to the Nahua, an indigenous peoples with roots located across parts of Mexico and El Salvador.
A reference to the Aztec mythology of the underworld, Mictlán is one of four places a soul enters to spend eternity based on one’s cause of death.
“’Mictlán’ references the conception of death in Mesoamerican thought — life-death duality,” said Santos-Briones. “I created this work through extensive research, revisiting the iconography of death through pre-Hispanic and colonial texts. These images associated with death have crossed territorial and temporal borders, but at the same time, the Catholic Church has not recognized one of the most important saints of popular Catholicism in Mexico, Santa Muerte.”
When creating the community altar at the center of her installation, Santos-Briones was heavily influenced by her family’s Día de los Muertos celebrations in Tulancingo,…
Read the full article here
