Día de Muertos and the Art of Remembering

By Josh Stein · Founder, Art of NOMA, Mexico City · writing on the emerging-art market since 2023

Día de Muertos falls on 1 and 2 November. The first day is for children who have died, the second for adults — a distinction that gets flattened in most descriptions written outside Mexico, and one that matters to the people keeping the tradition.

It is also, unavoidably, an art form. The ofrenda is a constructed object with a grammar: specific materials, specific placements, specific meanings. And the imagery most associated with it comes not from folk anonymity but from a named printmaker working in Mexico City in the early twentieth century. This is written from Mexico City, where the tradition is not a theme but a fact of the calendar.

What the two days actually are

1 November is for children who have died — often called Día de los Angelitos. 2 November is for adults. Families receive their dead on the appropriate day, which is why an ofrenda built for a child looks different from one built for a grandparent: different foods, different objects, toys rather than tobacco.

UNESCO inscribed the tradition in 2008, on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, under the title "Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead" — having first proclaimed it in 2003. That wording is worth reading carefully. It is indigenous festivity, not Mexican national holiday: what survives is a pre-Hispanic relationship to the dead that absorbed a Catholic calendar rather than being replaced by it.

The other thing worth stating plainly, because a great deal of writing about this gets it wrong: it is not a Mexican Halloween, and it is not primarily about death. It is about return. The premise is that the dead come back for a night and are fed. The tone in a family home is closer to a reunion than to mourning — which is exactly what makes the imagery so disorienting to outsiders, who read skeletons as horror rather than as guests.

The ofrenda, read as a made object

An ofrenda is assembled from a fixed vocabulary. Each element does a job, and treating it as decoration misses the whole structure:

• Cempásúchil — marigold. The colour and the scent are the path; petals are scattered to guide the dead from the door to the altar.
• Copal — tree resin burned as incense, in continuous use since well before the conquest. It cleans the space and carries the smell of ceremony.
• Water — for the thirst of the journey.
• Salt — purification, and preservation of the body for the return trip.
• Pan de muerto — bread, formed with bone-shaped strips across the top.
• Calaveras de azúcar — sugar skulls, often carrying a name written across the forehead. Sometimes the name of a living person, given as a joke.
• The photograph — the specific dead person. Without it the altar is generic; with it, it is addressed to someone.

Read as a made object, an ofrenda is an installation with strict rules, produced annually, by non-artists, with no expectation of permanence — it is dismantled within days. Almost every quality contemporary art spends enormous effort trying to achieve, this form achieves without self-consciousness: it is site-specific, participatory, materially precise and completely unsentimental about its own survival.

Who actually made La Catrina?

The elegant female skeleton in the wide feathered hat is the single most reproduced image associated with Día de Muertos, and it is routinely presented as anonymous folk imagery. It is not.

It was made by José Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913), a printmaker working in Mexico City, in a zinc etching produced around 1910–13. He called her La Calavera Garbancera. Garbancera was a pointed term for Mexicans — often of indigenous descent — who denied their origins and affected European dress and manners. The joke is savage and it is class satire: strip away the imported hat and the finery and everyone underneath is the same skeleton.

The name most people use came later. Diego Rivera placed her at the centre of his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central (1947), dressed her in a full gown, put himself beside her as a child, and it is from that mural that she became La Catrina.

Why this matters for a collector: the most recognisable piece of Mexican popular iconography was authored, dated and political. Mexican art has been doing this continuously — taking a vernacular form and using it to say something sharp — for well over a century. The contemporary work coming out of the country now sits in that line, not apart from it.

What an ofrenda and a collection share

Both are arrangements of objects that hold people in place.

An ofrenda is assembled from things that belonged to, or were loved by, a specific person, and the arrangement is what makes them legible as a life rather than as a pile of belongings. Take the photograph away and the meaning collapses. A collection works the same way in slower time: the individual works matter, but what they say together is a portrait of the person who chose them, and that portrait is not usually visible to the collector while they are assembling it.

This is the honest reason most people end up collecting, and it has nothing to do with investment. You are building something that will outlast you and that says, fairly precisely, what you paid attention to. We wrote about this at greater length in how to build a contemporary art collection, and our position on the investment question is set out in art as an investment vs. art as a collection.

Memory as a living subject in Mexican art

Memory is not a heritage theme here. It is one of the most active subjects in Mexican contemporary practice, and it appears in registers that have nothing to do with marigolds.

Among artists we represent, Chuma Montemayor makes photographs that behave like memory rather than like record — partial, weighted, unreliable in the way recollection actually is. Nuria Oliva paints domestic ritual and the objects that hold it. Tori Pounds works in the space between what was remembered and what was invented afterwards.

None of that is Día de Muertos work, and none of it should be read as such. The point is the opposite: the preoccupation with keeping people present through objects runs continuously through the culture, and it surfaces in contemporary painting and photography without needing a skeleton anywhere in the frame.

Seeing it properly if you are visiting

If you are in Mexico City for it, a few honest notes:

• The large public parade is a recent invention and not the tradition. It is enjoyable; it is not what the days are for.
• The real observance is domestic and in cemeteries, overnight, and it is private. Attend where you are invited, and behave as a guest.
• Public ofrendas are everywhere — in museums, universities, plazas and shops — and those are genuinely made to be looked at. The ones at the major institutions are often extraordinary constructions.
• Photograph the public ones, not the private ones. A family at a grave is not a photo opportunity.
• Buy from the makers. The sugar skulls, papel picado and ceramics sold in the markets are made by people whose living depends on these ten days.

Art of NOMA is a Mexico City gallery representing around forty artists working here and internationally. If the season leaves you interested in the contemporary work coming out of this country, the most exciting contemporary artists working in Mexico right now is where to begin, and the roster is where to look.

Verified 25 August 2026 against UNESCO's official inscription record for the tradition and standard art-historical sources for Posada and Rivera.

Art of NOMA is an official Artsy partner gallery based in Mexico City, representing around forty contemporary artists and more than 250 original works across painting, photography, print and sculpture.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• UNESCO — Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead — official inscription record, fetched 25 August 2026
• Museo Frida Kahlo — among the Mexico City institutions mounting major public ofrendas
• Museo Nacional de Antropología — pre-Hispanic context for the tradition

Interested in Mexican contemporary art? Art of NOMA is based in Mexico City and represents around forty artists working here and internationally. Start with the roster.