Ohio State Prepares Fourth Day Of The Dead Gathering

The Wexner Center for the Arts is preparing its fourth annual Día de los Muertos gathering, an event that starts months before the doors open. Marigolds are planted in a greenhouse by Fernanda Diaz-Basteris, a Latin American Studies professor and the event's coordinator, then picked the day before the celebration and arranged on an ofrenda inside the Wex. The altar is built for the community to gather around as they remember people who have died.

Javier Jasso, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Outreach Chair, said planning begins well ahead of the date. The department works with Ohio State's Latinx Studies Program and Center for Latin American Studies on the event. Diaz-Basteris and Paloma Martinez-Cruz, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, are, in Jasso's words, "the brains of the event."

The gathering runs Friday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. It includes music, dance, food, poetry and hands-on activities. Jasso said a dance group with upwards of 20 dancers is involved, and that planners have put together a playlist for the afternoon. Panadería La Oaxaqueña and Masa Mexican Grill are supplying tamales, hot chocolate and pan de muerto.

Richardson's work will be on hand alongside a coloring page contest that renders Brutus Buckeye's face as a calavera. Prizes for the contest range from sports tickets to Amazon gift cards.

Jasso said the event is meant to bring people to the Wexner Center and give them a place to belong at Ohio State. He described it as an event where people who keep altars at home and people who have never marked the holiday can take part together. "It's both open to the campus, but also open to the greater central Ohio Latino community, and everyone is invited," he said.

Kim Lopez, who teaches Sociology of Death and Dying at Ohio State and works as a trained grief therapist, said gatherings like this one matter to people who are grieving. "It's the idea that the memory and the bonds and the connections we have with them are so important that we have to honor them, when we find ways to do that ritually: bringing people together to share food, to create artwork, to have music, to enjoy and celebrate," Lopez said.

Lopez described the Day of the Dead as a day for lifting people up rather than a somber one, and said the ofrenda offers a way for anyone to take part. "By inviting them back, whether it's in a spiritual form or just in symbolic form, we get to have that connection for as long as we live," Lopez said. The event runs Friday, Oct. 30, from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.