In celebration of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, on the weekends of October 24 & 25 and October 31 & November 1, Bronx-based artist Lucrecia Novoa and the Mascaraviva puppeteers parade her giant skeleton and La Catrina puppets throughout the Garden. Inspired by both the traditional and modern representations of the skeletal character, Lucrecia’s puppets—made especially for this occasion—provide the perfect photo opportunity and interactive experience. Catch them wandering throughout the Garden from 12 to 4 p.m.!
But who is La Catrina? The referential image of death in Mexico, it is common to see La Catrina featured in Día de los Muertos celebrations, where death is treated with familiarity and hospitality instead of dread.
La Catrina was originally drawn as a satirical cartoon (1910–1913) by famous Mexican printmaker and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada. The etching was intended to make fun of Mexican elite who were adopting European fashion and attitudes. Named “La Calavera Garbancera,” the image was meant to represent the large gap between social classes, and was inspired by Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of death and Lady of Mictlan, the underworld.
Here is an image of Posado’s La Calavera Oaxaqueña, which is similar in style to the Catrina:
Here is a sneak peak at Lucrecia’s interpretation of Catrina:
Posada’s creation might have given La Catrina her form, but it was Diego Rivera, muralist, and husband of Frida Kahlo, who named her. Diego’s mural, “Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Centra (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central)” (1946–1948), features an image of Catrina right in the middle of the artwork, next to Frida. Because of Diego’s popularity, La Catrina rose to fame, and is a now iconic representation of the Mexican willingness to embrace death- and to even laugh at it. After all, there is something a bit humorous, if also a tad creepy, about a skeleton dressed in opulent fashion. Images and more information on the mural can be found here.
We do hope you will come out to celebrate the lives of loved deceased ones, especially Frida Kahlo, as we prepare to say goodbye to the exhibition on November 1!
Karen Daubmann is NYBG’s AVP for Exhibitions. She has researched, planned, and installed over 50 exhibitions in her seven years at the Garden.
At The New York Botanical Garden, exhibitions are planned over many years with the intent of bringing to life distant lands, influential people, interesting plants, rarely seen gardens, and fantastic landscapes. We immerse ourselves in the study of our subjects with the goal of evoking the gardens and the spirits of their creators within the walls of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory. In 2010, we transformed the galleries into Emily Dickinson’s Garden, complete with a path “just wide enough for two who love.” In 2012, when we celebrated Claude Monet, we knew the garden we created was one that he was surely enjoying when the glasshouse emptied each evening.
When we began to research Frida Kahlo, we wanted to delve into the story of the woman who has been examined through her pain and suffering and paint her in a different light. We wanted to learn more about the iconic face that is emblazoned on canvases, the strong and fierce-looking dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who used to be known as Diego Rivera’s wife and is now known simply as Frida. The more we researched, the more intrigued we became.
To us, Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird was an image of a woman immersed in tropical flora. Her still-life paintings, an important yet lesser-known portion of her work, are informative displays of the rich diversity of Mexico’s plant life. We were fascinated by the incredible detail of Kahlo’s curated life, as evidenced by her paintings, her letters, and archival photos of Kahlo and Rivera in their garden. Her story was ripe to be told by The New York Botanical Garden.
Winter is suddenly upon us and, as the temperatures plummet and the city braces for the inevitable snow and ice, many will find their way to the garden’s iconic Enid A. Haupt Conservatory to decompress, take a leisurely stroll among the lush, tropical foliage, and escape the bitter cold. Some, perhaps inspired by the lowland rain forest houses or the desert displays, will jet off to warmer climes. While I freely admit that I already work in paradise, it’s nice to get out and see some of my plants in habitat now and again.
I recently took an exploratory trip through the Sonoran desert of Mexico and into Arizona. By design I made no specific plans and, like a slightly less profane version of Anthony Bourdain, I had “No Reservations.” From the dusty desert proper through the dense Chaparral shrubland and semi-arid grasslands of Arizona, much of the area ranges in temperature from broiling hot to bone-chilling, depending on month and time of day. Here it was late October and still scorching with nary a cloud in the sky to provide respite.
The landscape is truly as beautiful as it is unforgiving, and the same may be said of the plant life. My arms and legs looked as if they’d been shredded by a tidal wave of furious cats; such were the hazards of botanizing in a region so thick with spiny inhabitants. I would later discover the name for a cowboy’s protective “chaps” was actually derived from the word “Chaparral”—an arid and prickly biome on the Sonoran desert’s northern border. One quickly discovers the Chaparral functions quite efficiently as human sandpaper.
