This is Sandy Brown Jensen, and you're listening to Viz City, KLCC's arts review program.
What if the membrane separating the living from the dead isn’t a coffin wall, but a porous borderland?
That question pulses through the 33rd annual Día de los Muertos exhibition, on view through November 6th at Eugene's Maude Kerns Art Center. Beyond the customary marigolds and sugar skulls, this year’s show cuts straight to the bone, confronting historical trauma, state violence, and deep personal grief.
Take Analee Fuentes’s towering, electric collage, Self-Portrait with Taco. Here, a grinning skull wearing an artist's palette and a crown of paintbrushes clutches a taco while riding a wide-eyed burro. By cheekily incorporating the taco into a sacred folk tradition, Fuentes uses biting humor and self-mockery to skewer cultural stereotyping, transforming mortality and identity into a defiant, joyful act of creative survival.
Across the gallery, Portland artist Álvaro Tarragó offers a quiet, devastating counterpoint with “Desolation.” Across four conjoined panels, a sweeping, pale blue sky hovers over a barren, ochre field scored with crosses and floating wire cages. Tarragó strips away festive pageantry to confront the perilous migrant journey, locating the dead in the harsh geopolitical terrain of the borderlands.
Then there is Katherine Gorman’s shadowbox shrine called, “An Ofrenda for those lost in our streets at the hands of ICE.” Reinterpreting Frida Kahlo’s 1938 bathtub painting “What the Water Gave Me,” Gorman floats tiny, submerged human figurines inside a porcelain bathtub, their suspended bodies tethered by blood-red threads to framed portraits below. It is a gut-wrenching sanctuary of political witness, honoring lives violently stolen on American soil.
Surrounded by nine communal ofrendas, these artists remind us that honoring the dead is an urgent, living act of remembrance and justice.
