Description:
two figures made of bread, reproduced in Frances Toor, "Mexican Popular Arts," (1939), p. 102.
Label Text:
The culture of death is full of joy in this portrait of two loaves of sweet bread. Bakers make “Bread for the Dead” to leave as offerings to ancestors on the Day of the Dead, a celebration that combines Catholic traditions of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days with the Mayan belief in two-way connections between the living and the dead. Day of the Dead transforms the birth-to-death line of a life into a kinetic web of timelines crossing between the dead and the living. Photographers Manuel and Lola Álvarez Bravo traveled Mexico in the early 1930s to document regional customs, celebrations, and folklore like Day of the Dead. This photograph captures loaf offerings shaped intricately as human figures and decorated with curlicue sweaters and quizzical expressions.
Tags:
ceremonies; figures; food; religion Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1998.126 |
