This past Saturday I attended Catrinas En Mi Cuidad (Catrinas in my City), an outdoor art exhibit inspired by Mexico's Dia de Muretos, at the Denver Performing Arts Complex's Sculpture Garden, where I took the attached photographs. Catrinas are symbolic of Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, which takes place every November 1st and 2nd. The Sculpture Garden, by the way, is where "Dancers" is located, which features what looks like two 60-foot-tall dancing space aliens, and has generated a lot of talk here (mostly negative), and cost Denver taxpayers 1.58 million dollars. On the bright side, the Catrinas En Mi Cuidad exhibit diverted everyone's attention from those dancers, at least for the afternoon.
This exhibit of larger-than-life catrinas was created by Jaen Cartoneria, a collective of artists from Mexico City, and costume and set designer Ricardo Soltero. The Day of the Dead, of course, is a holiday that celebrates and remembers family and friends who have passed away, and is celebrated in Mexico and among people of Mexican heritage everywhere. Curiously, the exhibit took place on the same day as the Denver Zombie Crawl, a few blocks away in Denver's Larimer Square, which made it very convenient to move from one festival to the other, which I thought was pretty nifty.
In addition to the giant Catrinas, there was also a living Catrina walking around, as seen in the photograph on the left. And this reminded me that First Friday takes place in Denver's Santa Fe Arts District on November 1st, a week from this Friday, and the Museo de las Americas, located there, hosts an annual Catrina Costume Contest, which also includes a parade along Santa Fe Drive. Be there or be square, as we hipsters like to say.
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