Day of the Dead SF

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The Marigold Project serves the community by creating healing spaces connecting us to our ancestors and our impermanence in One Spirit. By providing cultural education, art and writing therapy workshops, and altar building skills connecting as a community, we honor the circle of life and death. We respect life by teaching our children who we are in the cosmos, our humanity, and the preservation of our planet.


We invite you to Participate in the Festival of Altars

Every November 2nd, the Marigold Project produces the Dia de Los Muertos, Festival of Altars, and the Ritual Poetry Circle in Potrero Del Sol Park, located at 25th Street and San Bruno Avenue. We are busy at work developing a beautiful program this year. This is a drug and alcohol-free family event. All are encouraged to participate. Please come with your altar or offerings; all votive candles should be encased in glass, flowers, photos, and favorite objects to honor your loved ones. You can also signup ahead of time to reserve a location to erect an altar. Please read our safety protocol and signup on the Festival of Altar’s page.


View our youtube channel

The making and viewing of traditional, contemporary, or experimental altars is a unique transformative experience connecting us closer to our Ancestors. All are welcome to tune-in and participate at home!

In 2021 we also presented the Blooming Heart Workshop Series. The series offered a range of cultural education workshops ranging from ancestral food, to flower medicine, ancestral wisdom, and cosmic balance. Thank you to all who attended! We look forward to curating a new experience next year to support you in cultivating your own practices.

More about Day of the Dead

WE WALK ON THE AVENUES OF THE DEAD 

San Francisco’s Day Of The Dead Holidays is rooted in Mesoamerican tradition. In the past forty years it has grown in the Mission District with a steel commitment to maintain a non-denominational spiritually focused core, free to the public and free of commercialization. It is a San Francisco Mexican and Latinx driven multicultural signature holiday defining our culture in the Mission District open to all. 

San Francisco is connected to the holy city of Teotihuacan, a UNESCO World Heritage site, known to scholars as a city built to reflect the heavens located thirty miles north-east of Mexico City. It was the largest, most influential, and most revered ancient civilization in the history of the western hemisphere. This site houses the enormous pyramids honoring the Sun, the Moon and a smaller, but now considered the most important of the three, a monument to Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent, a large burial site. 

The enormous Avenue of the Dead, Avenida de Los Muertos, a road three miles long and 131 feet wide was the Day of the Dead Processional site architecturally connecting these monuments. It is part of the Inca trails linking El Camino and the Mission roads, including our Mission Street in San Francisco.  

The sacred Avenue of the Dead held hundreds of thousands of people four times a year honoring our Ancestors, the changing of the seasons, the elements, and most importantly honoring the Spirit of life. Its influence continues to live in the ritual design, art, and spiritual practices here in the San Francisco’s Mission District. Archaeological evidence suggests Teotihuacan, meaning birthplace of the gods, was a multi-ethnic city, with distinct quarters occupied by Otomi, Zapotec, Mixtec, Maya, and Nahua people. Their art and rituals reflected combinations of its inhabitants, it stands to reason that our San Francisco Day of the Dead celebrations reflects the rich cultural diversity of our City. 

We are made from our mother's and father's ancestral DNA, we are the descendants of our ancestors, the bad, the good, the powerful, the ugly and beautiful—most importantly we embody a Spirit uniquely our own. By acknowledging our death we honor our life.

Marigold Project is a 501 c3 fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts