October Installment III, In Mid-November

Lest you think I didn't, I did attend this year's Dia de los Muertos at Hollywood Forever. To prove it to you, belatedly, here are some of my favorite altars from the event.

My First Altar (October Installment II)

Here's my first altar, which I built for free at El Centro del Pueblo's festival. Many of the decorations were unsaleable merchandise from the Craft and Folk Art Museum Shop - a big thank you to Miss Yuko, who let me scavenge, and to Erin who took night photos!

October: First Installment

October is a big month for altars - last night I attended El Centro del Pueblo's Dia de los Muertos festival, and next week is the Hollywood Forever extravaganza with elaborate altars up to the sky - so I'll be posting in installments...

The altars in this post are from El Centro del Pueblo's celebration, a great event put on by Echo Park's El Centro del Pueblo community center and Erik Garcetti and the L.A. City Council. There were 16 official altars built by community members, and additional altars and altar-inspired works in the evening's art showcase. Community and artist altars were freely available to interested participants and the festival itself was free and open to the public. Neighborhood restaurants donated food, proceeds of which will help purchase holiday gifts for local children.    

Altar for the Artist: part of the art exhibition.

Patriotic:

Pet altar:

School-project-esque-altar honoring Alexander Graham Bell, Benjamin Franklin, César Chávez, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Selena (Quintanilla-Pérez):

El Patillo Restaurant

Who is Tia Chucha?

 Every few years Tia Chucha would visit the family
in a tornado of song and open us up
as if we were an overripe avocado.
She was a dumpy, black-haired
creature of upheaval who often came unannounced
with a bag of presents, including homemade
perfumes and colognes that smelled something like
rotting fish on a hot day at the tuna cannery...Excerpt, Luis Rodriguez

I found Tia Chucha's while making the rounds changing out artworks with Folk Art Everywhere. My compadre is Jedi, short for Jedidiah, a slight art handler from Texas with a bushy, all-white ponytail. After a few stops down in Leimart Park, we make the trek up through the valley, ending at Tia Chucha's Cafe Cultural and Bookstore in Sylmar, with almost nothing north of us except for the hills.

The center was founded by author Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., activist Maria Trinidad Rodriguez, and community leader Enrique Sanchez. Named after Luis's favorite aunt, the center opened in 2001, and celebrates Chicano/a heritage while offering space and resources for creative and spiritual growth in the community. "Tia Chucha's will be a positive and visionary force, to enhance what is decent, compassionate and just in our communities while reconnecting to our ancestral roots and teachings in the vortex of great social transitions and technological development."

While Jedi did the hard work, I snapped pictures of this shrine to Tia Chucha, constructed around a colorfully painted chair in the corner. I was especially charmed by the extra white votives, ready and waiting.

Phill's House

After months and months (and months) without posting, I'm finally getting back in the swing of things, and what better way than with a visit to the multi-altared house of my colleague Phill! Phill knows a tremendous amount about a tremendous amount, and the apartment he shares with his partner is a treasure trove of books, masks, antiques, original artwork, and salvaged finds, all of which have their own story; Phill was generous enough to share some of these stories with me.

This is a Buddhitsan, a Buddhist altar, that are most often found at the doors of Japanese Buddhists' homes.  The mandala inside is written in Japanese, Chinese, and Sanskrit, and reads "Nam myoho Renge Kyo", the mandala for the Lotus Sutra meaning "I bow to the mystical law of cause and effect." Here is a close-up of the mandala. Phill changes the flower (a camellia here) every couple of days.

This buddhitsan has a mon, a Japanese family crest, affixed to its upper portion.  This one is made of metal, but nowadays most are made of plastic.

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The piece below is an original work that Phill made. Using a wooden box found in a thrift store (with the name "Pete" carved into the side!), he constructed the "N'kisi Amerikano", an Americanized n'kisi box based on the African tradition of creating a shrine box to host energies that can be both positive or negative. The center of the character on the outside of the box is made from a broken light bulb; reflective glass and mirrors are a common component of n'kisi shrines that are included in order to see into the ancestral world.

N'kisis also often feature nails driven into the vessel, meant to waken spirits. Inside N'kisi Amerikano, Phill drove nails into three pieces of driftwood, two of which were blackened with ink. To the right of the text "N'kisi box Amerikano" is a piece of snakeskin that Phill found near the freeway here in L.A.

Can you see Pete?

This piece is a gau, a portable Tibetan container shrine. This gau is a middle 1800s elite piece; the stones are turquoise and coral, and the central figure is an ivory lama or bodhissatva. (A bodhissatva is a buddha that has renounced nirvana in order to stay here and help others pursue enlightenment.)

Phill showed me several of his original boxes. This one, "Broken-hearted Devil", is my favorite.

Dia de los Muertos

Almost a month later, I am posting photos from the spectacular Dia de los Muertos festival at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.  Altars galore, but also Aztec dancing, face paint, paper mache skeletons, sugar skulls, food, flowers, bones.

 

Crossing the river.

En honor de mujeres artistas.