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Pearl's new take on Día de los Muertos inspired by centuries of history

Regina Moya with her creation
Courtesy photo
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Regina Moya
Regina Moya with her creation

Día de los Muertos at Pearl has a new art installation that turns back history hundreds of years.

Regina Moya is the artist who conceived it. She has done several Day of the Dead installations at Pearl over the years.

“This year I wanted to do something very different, and I was inspired by the Mexican Tzompantli. Tzompantli is a Nahuatl word,” Moya said. “It means rack of skulls, and they used to have these structures in the Mesoamerican cultures. And the Aztecs had them. The Mayan had them.”

Día de los Muertos altars usually feature pictures of loved ones lost, their favorite things in life, and brightly colored marigolds. This installation features 30 oversized and painted skulls.

Dia de los Muertos skull installation
Courtesy photo
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Regina Moya
Dia de los Muertos skull installation

“The finished installation is a series of 30 hand- painted skulls in the fashion of the Mexican Talavera Poblana from Puebla de Los Angeles, and they are actually stacked in wooden sticks, just like the original Tzompantli would be,” she said.

Moya said that these exhibitions in pre-Hispanic Mexico weren’t just there for decoration.

“They had mainly two purposes. One was religious, where they would be offerings to the gods. So these were the very first altars before the influence of the Spaniards," she explained. “And also they had a political message. It was kind of like a warning to everybody that came into the city to see how powerful they were.”

The Esperanza Peace and Justice Center is hosting its annual Día de los Muertos event on Nov. 1. It celebrates the lives the historic West Side community has lost.

The bright white skulls are covered in stark blue patterns — birds, leaves and other items. Those 30 skulls had to be mounted in one place in Tzompantli tradition, which necessitated a structure.

“Once I saw where the space was going to be, then we figured out how we were going to do the structure. And fortunately, my husband is an engineer, so he helped me with that part of the installation,” Moya said.

skull installation
Courtesy photo
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Regina Moya
Centuries of history inspired the display.

There are those who think that these racks full of skulls are also the origins of another Día de los Muertos tradition.

“Some say that the sugar skulls, these are the origins of the sugar skulls, also because ... we always see them ... kind of like together, in racks,” she said.

The installation is next to the fountain outside of Boiler House at Pearl. It will be there for a few more days in early November.

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Jack Morgan can be reached at jack@tpr.org and on Twitter at @JackMorganii