An Ofrenda Grows in Brooklyn
Cinthya Santos-Briones debuts her first installation, Mictlan, in Green-Wood Cemetery honoring the Day of the Dead.
It was still weeks until Dia de los Muertos –– the Day of the Dead –– which in Mexico would involve ‘ofrendas,’ or offerings, in the corners of homes on altars. There were not yet the fresh-cut and earthy smelling marigolds placed in arches, or the favorite cigarettes of late relatives put out as offerings.
Yet the dead were already on Cinthya Santos-Briones’ mind.
“We say in Mexico that we laugh about the dead,” said New York artist Cinthya Santos-Briones. “We have this relationship with the dead that is more sarcastic. And it’s in our culture, it’s in our art, it’s in our murals.”
Santos-Briones has incorporated colorful skulls and crocheted flowers as part of her first artist installation, a community offering for the Day of the Dead at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. Serving as one large, communal altar, the installation invites New Yorkers to bring offerings much like they would to personal, at-home altars, to honor the spirits of deceased loved ones together.
Santos-Briones’ public ofrenda, Mictlan, named after the Aztec underworld, runs from Oct. 14 to Nov. 19 at Green-Wood’s Historic Chapel, though the Day of the Dead is traditionally only celebrated the first two days of November.
Tapestries hung from the walls in pulsing, alternating colors of reds, greens, and blues. Garlands mixed with the chapel’s already rainbow stained glass windows. Complimentary candles and note cards were available to create offerings for visitors, with room to put them on the orange and purple altar.
Since the October opening, more candles were gradually lit on the altar. People began to bring more personalized objects, placed beside carefully written-out note cards. For Beth. For Helen Cook. For Dad. For my grandpa and my cat, Percy. The notes were sometimes accompanied by drawings or by Reese’s peanut butter cups. Two black and white photos of a tattooed guy playing electric guitar laid one by the other, his neck veins and scream captured forever still, through the blurry lens of a camera. Some left carnations to dry. Others left glass Coca Cola bottles.
A cemetery bird-watcher, Linda Ewing, wandered through the chapel on Oct. 15, the day after the installation’s opening, and imagined how the ofrenda would grow.
“I do think it’s going to gain poignancy, and beauty, and interest as more people come by and light candles and leave little articles,” Ewing said.
She was struck by a deck of playing cards someone had left.
“It just makes you sort of develop stories that may be totally mistaken,” Ewing said. “But still, it encourages you to think of the lives that are represented by all the things that people leave.”
The installation’s center, made of unpainted plywood, holds a largely unknown pyramid, the Huapalcalco, from Tulancingo in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, where Santos-Briones lived through her teenage years. She sprinkled crushed marigolds, long-dried, on the pyramid’s steps, which stood above the altar.
In this way, Santos-Briones wanted the installation’s altar element to reflect on beginnings and endings.
“I wanted to show to the people who see the installation or exhibition or the altar, that it’s not simple to reduce or put in the box a Day of the Dead,” Santos-Briones said. “It’s a lot of symbols and history through codex. And through archeology, we can reflect more.”
It has been a curious journey to get here for the New York based artist with Nahua roots. For a decade, she was a researcher in Mexico’s National Institute of Archeology and History. She wrote for a Mexican newspaper and also dabbled in photojournalism. She learned to embroider in school the same way her mother had. It all led to the commission of this installation –– her very first –– in which she hung up embroidered skulls and flowers.
She traveled to Tulancingo to create those elements, in large part with help from her grandmother. This included creating motifs of patron saint Santa Muerte.
Heavy metal enthusiast and frequent visitor of Green-Wood Cemetery, Christ Ratke, 50, said the Day of the Dead resonated with him because of its use of skulls in the artwork.
Ratke referred to Santa Muerte as “the Virgin Mary Grim Reaper,” and found that the cult-image spoke to him.
“That was something that I thought was a beautiful piece of artwork,” he said.
In rainy days at the Brooklyn cemetery, various people trudged with wet sneakers into the beige-tiled chapel. There were few who left without crying. Alexis Kleinman, 33 from Queens, sniffled from emotion. Raija Kalogrias, 58, used a crumpled tissue to catch her tears as she recounted the notes she wrote to her mom and friend. Ewing –– the birdwatcher –– spoke harrowingly about the horrors unfolding in the larger news, and the deaths of children in the Israel-Hamas War.
As Ewing started to tear up, she pointed past the wooden doors of the Historic Chapel. She said the importance of the installation was nothing if not “creating a vehicle for people to celebrate and recognize one another’s mutual humanity.”
And then, in a moment, Ewing took off running, her binoculars swinging behind her neck like a scarf. As a group of three came out of the chapel, wiping their eyes, Ewing was already down past the archangel statue, and breezing through Willow Avenue.
She was headed to cry, she explained in her haste, on the Sweet Gum Path, a stretch of trees thrashing in the wind. She would return with her daughter to the ofrenda the next weekend.