Dia de Los Muertos 2023
An on-site Day of the Dead alter built to honor deceased loved ones.
Gallery 86 hosted a Dia de los Muertos event and student art show in partnership with the School for the Talented and Gifted in Pleasant Grove, as well as the Young Women’s STEAM Academy at Balch Springs Middle School. Furthermore, the Gallery applied for funding and was awarded the Culture of Value grant from the Dallas Office of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts.
A featured student artist proudly posing next to her artwork on display.
Administrators and educators from both schools installed student artwork to display during the event and families visited the studio to see the work their young artists had created for the Day of the Dead. Educators also created a Day of the Dead alter to honor any deceased loved ones. Visitors were encouraged to leave notes and momentos of their loved ones at the alter for the duration of the show.
Visitors admiring some of the artwork on display.
Visitors were surprised to learn of Gallery 86’s presence in the neighborhood, as the Pleasant Grove community has very few arts offerings. Families were supportive of the work the Gallery was doing to grow and promote the arts in Pleasant Grove, and they were especially receptive to future plans that included art classes and other art shows.
Community members talking about the artwork on display.
Most of the artwork on display featured motifs that are common to Day of the Dead imagery, including the sugar skull. Mediums used included graphite and tempera paint. Most students were guided by their teachers to personalize their images, so each individual piece offered glimpses into the personality of their artist.
The Day of the Dead alter built on-site at the gallery.
Vendors were also invited to participate in the event. Lucky’s Tacos was on-site to make and sell tacos on demand. The ever popular, Me Enloteces, was also on-site to sell cups of corn. Exotic Leaves and Beans was also present, selling their unique and refreshing teas.
Food vendors on-site for the student art show.
The show also included a collaborative sculpture created by co-founder, Nicolas Gonzalez, named Tree of Life. The students, with the help of their teachers, created hundreds of origami butterflies at school and delivered them to the studio. Gonzalez took these butterflies, each representing a lost loved one, and arranged them in the shape of a tree. The tree was inspired by the Mayan tree of life, and it purposefully extended from the ground to the ceiling, to represent the transcendent journey of their loved ones that had passed on.
A close up view of the butterflies that make up the Tree of Life.
During the event, visitors were encouraged to take a butterfly and add it to the sculpture to represent a specific loved one that had passed on. Visitors took their time adding to the sculpture throughout the event, with each visitor taking their time to contemplate their contribution to the work.
The promotional flyer for the event.
Brothers of Sigma Lambda Beta posing in front of the collaborative Tree of Life sculpture.
This event marked the first public event hosted at the physical location of Gallery 86. The community response was positive and encouraging. The Gallery would like to thank the administrators and educators of both schools for approaching the group for a collaboration, especially Louis Sanchez. The Gallery would also like to thank Dallas’s Office of Arts and Culture, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts for funding this event.