Courtesy photos
SANTA BARBARA — The Santa Barbara Museum of Art presents a free family day in celebration of Día de los Muertos in the Museum’s back plaza, Family Resource Center, and galleries. For the 30th year, the Museum honors the Mexican tradition of remembering the dead with a variety of family festivities include altar displays, art activities, live music, dance performances, an interactive altar installation to artists in the collection designed by the Museum’s Teaching Artists, and traditional Mexican refreshments. Admission to the family event and to the Museum is free.
The event’s art activities include skull charms, paper flowers, calavera triptychs, still-life mini-altars, and an interactive sugar skull mural.
Visit the new Family Resource Center installation Star Finder Studio inspired by exhibition The Observable Universe: Visualizing the Cosmos in Art, and create your own version of the phases of the moon with lunar templates on endless scrolls of paper, reimagine mythical constellations on the Star Finder wall, and capture animal or astronaut activity on the interactive planetary surface stations.
La Cafeteras and Folkloric Dance Group Quetzalcoatl offer music and dance performances throughout the day.
Santa Barbara artist Jane Mulfinger, along with volunteers, will be collecting anonymous stories in English and Spanish in response to the question “Where do you belong?” This anonymous survey will help build the text portion of Mulfinger’s West is South exhibition, to be installed at the Atkinson Gallery and temporary stations around anta Barbara. The art of detailed narrative—descriptions of sounds, sights, smells, textures, qualities of light, are aspects that are the foundation for this roving, publicly-sited work.
SBMA’s display of altars are created by various partner schools and community organizations, including San Marcos High School, Montecito Union School, and La Cuesta Continuation School, and students enrolled in the Museum’s free in school and after-school programs, such as Homework/Artwork After-School Program at Girls, Inc. Carpinteria, Girls, Inc. Santa Barbra and A-OK After-School, and SBMA’s Emerging Teens Program, ArtReach at Canalino School, ArtReach El Camino, Art Reach at Adams School, and SBMA’s Partnership with Knox School. Each group has incorporated traditional symbols and iconography to offer thanks to departed family, friends, or artists in the Museum’s collection.
Location:
Santa Barbara Museum of Art
1130 State Street, Santa Barbara