In fall 2024, the Art Center invited Mexico City-born artist Aliza Nisenbaum, the 2024-2025 Toni and Tim Urban International Artist-in-Residence, to meet with pivotal members of the Art Center’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) committee, which has for the last 25 years planned and coordinated the institution’s annual Día de los Muertos festivities. Día de los Muertos is a Latin American festival that is held in the fall and honors the lives of departed loved ones. It is observed with food, music, and offerings to the deceased. Nisenbaum’s initial visit coincided with the Art Center’s 2024 Día de los Muertos celebration. The artist immersed herself in the event, taking pictures and engaging in conversation with participants. She also photographed and sketched the committee members, many of them pillars of Des Moines’s Latino community. These encounters became the inspiration for a series of five vibrant, dynamic portraits that Nisenbaum debuted at the Art Center.

In Ofrenda, Day of the Dead Committee Members, Des Moines Art Center, Nisenbaum depicts the individuals responsible for the yearly planning of Day of the Dead at the Art Center, while also creating a representation of the community to which they belong. The painting combines details from multiple preparatory drawings and photographs Nisenbaum made during her visit. Rich in allegory, Nisenbaum’s painting includes a wide range of cultural and social symbols. Imagery related to Día de los Muertos abounds, including candles, animated skeletons or calacas, monarch butterflies, and the vibrant orange marigold known as cempasúchil, or “flower of many petals,” all elements of the traditional ofrenda, or altar. Ofrenda is the Spanish word for offering. It is also used to describe a home altar meant to honor the dead and guide their soul from the land of the dead to the living during Day of the Dead. Each year, the Art Center community creates an elaborate version of such an altar. Nisenbaum’s work evokes this bustling preparation as well as the vibrant sensory experience of viewing the altar at the event, as thousands of visitors do each year. The piece also functions as a record of Nisenbaum’s artistic process; she includes images of her sitters accompanied by the mirrors she used while making preliminary sketches in a classroom at the Art Center and features objects of personal significance these sitters brought to accompany them in their portraits. Through her compression of these different moments in time, she foregrounds the social fabric of the museum as the protagonist of the painting. Nisenbaum’s portrait commemorates a place, a community, and a tradition—Día de los Muertos—giving visual form to a gathering that ultimately celebrates love for friends, family, and neighbors.