Jaki Jean: Completing & Unveiling Mi Primer Calavera Catrina

My first attempt at creating my own Calavera Catrina is complete.

La Catrina’s image as the Lady of Death is rooted in ancient Aztec culture.  Mictecacihuatl, goddess of death and Lady of Mictlan, the underworld, ruled over the bones in the underworld.  She also presided over a month long festival honoring the dead.  With the arrival of Christianity, the Aztec Lady of Death & Her festival were appropriated & became Day of the Dead.

In the late 1800’s, a Mexican printmaker & artist, Jose Guadalupe Posada, became famous for calaveras  (skulls or skeletons).  Posada  eventually used his images & illustrations to expose the corruption of the government of the dictator Porfirio Díaz, to an illiterate majority of impoverished Mexicans suffering under Díaz’s regime.

One illustration, "La Calavera Catrina" published in 1910, featured the face & shoulders of skeleton dressed as a lady of high society.

By Jose Guadalupe Posada, circa 1910

And Catrina became a symbol of the revolution.

In 1947 the amazing artist Diego Rivera placed a full size Catrina, elegantly clad,  in the center of  his 50-foot mural,   Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central  ("Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park") in the Hotel del Prado in Mexico City. 

Catrina holds the 10-year-old Rivera's hand while Frida Kahlo stands behind them in traditional Mexican dress. To Catrina’s left is Jose Guadalupe Posada, offering her his arm.

At the same time La Catrina entrusts one bony hand to Posada, she firmly holds onto the young Diego’s grasp with her other.  A powerful tribute by Diego to the man who found an Aztec goddess & used her to created the textual braid Rivera took & made his own.

In making my first La Calavera Catrina, the goddess of death & revolutionary & usurped icon of Day of the Dead, it pleased me to learn about her history & her evolution into the amazing cultural & spiritual icon she is today.

I wonder about this goddess turned revolutionary rewritten as a cultural icon & I realize that in a former life, I would be exploring this curious metamorphosis.  I still may.

My Catrina is a most humble effort, but I like her.  She is far from the elegant ladies who inspired me to create her.  But she is so, so very Jaki Jean.

And I am already planning her sisters.