Come Honor Your Dead—a Ritual of Remembrance

Just as we celebrate the return of life in the Spring, we must honor the part of the eternal cycle that is death. Autumn is a time to experience nature’s sublime mystery of letting go, a reminder of the impermanence of our human condition.

“Come Honor Your Dead, A Ritual of Remembrance” is a collaboration of works offering rituals to acknowledge death and its role in our culture through art, spirit, and community. The event is partly inspired by The Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday. The experience provides a poetic space of memorials, art forms of Memento Mori, objects that engage remembering and bring comfort and gratitude. An altar embodies transition and channels the death experience to create solace. Visitors can offer written notes to those who are gone as a way of letting their love find acknowledgment and a resting place by leaving the note in our coffin.

Resident artist Saïd Osio and guest artist Maria Epes present this exhibit with the mission of inspiring conversations about a death positive culture. Maria Epes is a feminist artist with specific focus on expressions of the body in life and death. She strives for her art to heal and inform the sacred.