The chilly November wind rustles an immense tissue paper banner decorated with bright reds, blues, glitter, and gold foil, as black-clad Bostonians shuffle through the doors of the Boston Public Library. Sugar skulls and raucous skeletons leer up at them from the floor.

The visitors are looking at an exhibit entitled "Altars," celebrating the Mexican Day of the Dead and exploring views of death north and south of the border, sponsored by Boston's UrbanArts and the Mexican government.

View more photos from "Altars"

"Mexicans live with death and laugh at death," says artist Arturo Calleja."For Mexicans death is a party, and that's why it is colorful." Calleja is designer from Mexico City who flew to Boston to create a traditional "altar de muertos," an "altar to the dead."

Boston artists Kristen Struebing-Beazley and Bart Uchida were commissioned to interpret the Mexican tradition. The results look nothing like their Mexican inspiration, but they reflect different attitudes towards death. For Struebing-Beazley, death is gloomy and grim, silent and still. For Uchida, it is natural, a step in a cycle.

For the backdrop of his traditional Mexican altar, Calleja uses the centuries-old technique of cut paper, "papel picado," with geometric designs of rosettes and stars. Catholic symbolism is superimposed on the altar's pre-Hispanic origins and the Aztec outlook on death. At the apex of the altar is a gold heart pierced with seven daggers, the emblem of the Virgin of Sorrows, and a rose petal crucifix takes the center of the base.

As Mexicans adopted Catholicism, they adapted their altars to incorporate Christian symbols alongside their Aztec roots, and they merged Day of the Dead with the Catholic celebration of All Saints Day. Sacrifices became "offerings."

"Traditionally, the offerings are food, fruits, incense, and flowers. Everything is alive," says Calleja. His altar is strewn with flower petals, candles, skulls, and toys. Miniature twin skeletons sit amid the offerings with cigarettes in their bony hands, a send-up, the artist says, of American attitudes to smoking.

The altar looks terribly fragile as it sways in the wind. Children walking past step over the rope to grab at the toys on the ground, scattering the rose petals that cover the floor. Altars are typically built up on a riser, but Calleja decided to display the offerings on the ground. The effect is that they look haphazard and jumbled, like toys played with and left out, rather than arranged for a dead loved one. The paper backdrop is stunning, but the offerings seem like an afterthought.

Altar by Kristin Struebing-Beazley (Photo: W. Thomson)

The humor and vibrancy of the Mexican altar contrasts with the grim installation by Boston artist Kristin Struebing-Beazley. "It has Victorian gloom all over it. It is a blackened ensemble of shrouds and veils," says the artist in a wavering voice. The piece is over the top, a caricature of mourning, fully draped in black gauze like an Edward Gorey sketch come alive.

Struebing-Beazley designed her altar as a "memento mori," a monument to encourage people to meditate on the future. "North American culture doesn't take the time to think about mortality," she says. "We live in a society that tries to hide death and put it away somewhere. We wish it would go away, but it doesn't."

The altar is comprised of two glass museum cases. In one case sit overturned ceramic bowls in rows. At a glance, the half shells are unidentifiable and look like they could be a small army of turtles wading through a black pond. On closer inspection, they are pottery cranial caps that the artist likens to skulls in a killing field, or artifacts from the Smithsonian. Either way, these featureless remains send a message that death is impersonal and anonymous.

She says she made the bowls with a purpose in mind. "I knew I wanted to make something to use to cry into. It's after a Roman custom of making vessels for tears," though she says she has never used them herself.

In a vertical display case are more cranium bowls, photos of dead babies, and paper dolls of Struebing-Beazley's ancestors and relatives. The case is topped with black ostrich plumes, morose ornaments lifted from a Victorian funeral. At the top of this strange assemblage is inscribed "Homo Sum: Humani Nil a Me Alienum Puto," I am Human: so Nothing Human is Strange to Me.

Altar by Bart Uchida (Photo: W. Thomson)

The final altar was created by Boston artist Bart Uchida, who constructed it out of natural materials: logs, ashes, corn, vines, twigs, and earth. Some passing by said it looked like a scene from "Blair Witch," but the artist says he is using universal symbols to express themes of disintegration, release, and regeneration.

Uchida has built a rough-hewn hut from birch logs, lashed together with rope. On one side, he suspends a blackened bag filled with coal, and black dust spilled below it, a meditation on the theme of disintegration. On the other side, a white bag holds corn, and bright yellow cornmeal is spilled around it, the seeds a reflecting the theme of regeneration.

In the middle section is what Uchida terms "the open nest, the flight upwards." He has twisted a human-sized nest of vines, weaving them tightly at its base, and looser as the strands coil upwards. One thick stem traces a helix path up and out the top of the altar: release.

Viewed from front, the black and white bags hang like balances of life and death, but the middle theme of release transcends the limits of the box of the altar and rises up. From the ashes "new hope, new life, new joy springs forward," says Uchida.

The three installations are themselves fleeting. At the end of November, the pieces will be disassembled and removed, and their parts recycled for the artists' next conception.

"Altars in Celebration of the Day of the Dead" is on display at Boston Public Library's Johnson Lobby and Concourse lobby in Boston, MA, through November 30, 2002.

MORE ARTS HEADLINES

	Curtains for Boston Costume			"So Much, So Fast"
	Anything But Ordinary			Roller Rink on Thin Ice

		Arts Features Films at the Gate Photos See photos of kung-fu movies and former Boston Chinatown movie theater locations. Guerrilla Art See photos of local artist Matthew Hincman's bench-like sculpture. "O" is for Original Local artist "Danny O" portrays whimsical scenes of summer in Boston. Multimedia Singer at 100 An exclusive online special explores the controversial work and life of Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer. Gauguin's Tahiti Paintings Take a multimedia tour of Paul Gauguin's Tahiti paintings, including the famous painting, "Where Are We From." Hawthorne at 200 View a multimedia celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 200th birthday.