Melanie Cervantes and the Making of the 2019 Dia de los Muertos Commemorative Print– 'Light the Way for the Spirits of the Ancestors'
By: Gabrielle Garcia
Artist Melanie Cervantes mid process, with her Commemorative Print “Light the Way for the Spirits of the Ancestors”.
Since 1973, Self Help Graphics & Art has produced one of the most renown Día de los Muertos cultural events in Los Angeles — noted as one of the nation’s oldest and LA’s first Day of the Dead public commemoration in the nation. Entering into its 46th Día de los Muertos Celebration and Exhibition year, SHG continues to honor the ancient tradition of Día de los Muertos as a way to celebrate life, reflect and cherish loved ones who have passed on, and hold space for community that not only reside in Boyle Heights and local neighborhoods, but for all Angelenos.
Engaging with life, death, and memory in ways that differ greatly from the dominant North American approach, Día de los Muertos imbues color, spirituality, and longevity in its reflection on ancestors and deceased family and community members. The focus on spirits connects folks to those who have passed in a sense of eternal unity, rather lament strictly physical separation.
Every year SHG invites an artist from the printmaking community to create a limited edition serigraph to commemorate the year’s Día de los Muertos Celebration, and to curate a group exhibition based on that year’s theme. For the 2019 Celebration, Melanie Cervantes, co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde and recent lung cancer survivor, whose print “The Future is Bright” was featured at last spring’s Annual Print Fair, was chosen to create this distinguished print.
The print is named “Light the Way for the Spirits of the Ancestors” and depicts an older woman holding a lit candle, wearing a white shawl and silver earrings and encompassed by a large orange marigold. In this subdued and reflective piece, Cervantes intentionally avoided from the skull imagery traditionally associated with Día de los Muertos. “I think the skull imagery was something that was really clear I wanted to stay away from because I feel like that in particular has been highly commercialized. You have packages of face paint being sold as a Day of the Dead thing, where you’re seeing it in the Halloween stores. Our culture is getting packaged and resold to us. I was intentionally trying to stay away from skull and skeleton imagery and really distill it down to some key elements,” said Melanie.
For Cervantes, these key elements of Día de Los Muertos are the orange marigold, the candle, and the subtle borders of the print that reference papel picado, or perforated paper, which are decorative tissue papers often used to decorate altars. The woman in this piece is not someone particular from Cervantes’ own life. Instead, her intention was to make the subject “look like it’s your tía, or your neighbor, or the lady you buy your fruit from,” but still connect her culturally with the Oaxacan silver earrings. Cervantes purposefully pursued a more universal, yet grounded, visual approach that would allow viewers of all backgrounds to access the print in ways that would still allow for reflections on life, death, and memory, the core of Día de los Muertos.
“And I think the other part of it that’s more subconscious than conscious is I did intentionally choose this woman that’s living and breathing because of where I’m at. It’s us,” Cervantes says. “We’re living and we’re remembering this relationship to people that we’ve had in our life and also this relationship to knowing that this is all temporary. In that temporariness, now I have this newfound appreciation for [life] and so for me it’s a rich experience to live life. It’s wonderful to be alive.”
True to its title, Cervantes’ print lights the way for viewers’ reflection of their own connection to their ancestors, family, and community. The woman of the print gazes not at us, but calmly ahead, toward what one can only speculate: her future, her inevitable passing, her family, her altar. It is through that uncertainty, the temporary nature of this moment, that viewers can look inward into their own lives and find meaning and comfort in their connections to those both alive and dead as well as their connection to the world they inhabit.
The 46th Annual Día de los Muertos Exhibition is on view from Thursday, October 10, 2019 - Wednesday, November 27, 2019. The Exhibition Opening Reception is Thursday, October 10, 2019 from 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM. The 46th Annual Día de los Muertos Celebration will take place Saturday, November 2, 2019 at Self Help Graphics & Art .
Gabrielle Garcia was a Self Help Graphics & Art Getty Marrow Undergraduate summer intern and a recent graduate of Scripps College.