Day of the Dead; summoning the dead with art supplies
Nov 1, 2024, 5:17 PM | Updated: 7:08 pm
SALT LAKE CITY — Every year Marla Love and her family summon the dead, with art supplies.
That’s what you do when you celebrate Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, and you come from a family of artists.
“I tell my students that I was born with the paintbrush in my hand,” Love, who runs the afterschool art program Art First Arte Primero, said.
Day of the Dead, celebrated Nov. 1 and 2, particularly in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Michoacan, is a holiday meant to remember and honor family and friends who have died.
Love, who now lives in Utah but over the years has spent time in Mexico, remembers visiting the graves of her grandfather and uncle there on the holiday.
“We’re all sitting around, we’re playing music, we’re singing,” she said. “Cultivating those memories of the person that has passed.”
“It’s a happy occasion, it’s not eerie,” she said.
“We bring the mariachi. We bring the music. They start singing whatever songs they (the dead) used to like. We have lunch or dinner. We basically spend all day and all night,” Rocio Mujica Aguilar Mejia, Love’s mother, said.
This year, the family set up altars at Art First, at Trolly Square, and at Millcreek Commons to promote Day of the Dead.
For Love, the holiday is now bittersweet. In recent years, her brother lost his fiancé and she lost a good friend in two separate car accidents one month apart.
“Yeah it’s, it’s still fresh,” Love said, tearfully.
Love remembers when she was young seeing thousands of people buying marigolds or cempasúchil – the “flower of the dead” – to decorate the gravesites. Its strong musky scent is said to guide the dead back to the living.
“Just because you can’t see them,” Jaseena, Love’s daughter, said, “doesn’t mean you can’t feel their warm embrace that they have. The impact that they have on their life.”
“We live the life that we live as an artist because of my family, because of my grandfather, because of my grandmother,” Love said. “It’s traditions that we honor to this day.”
