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Marigold Project
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. Visit our Workshops Page to see this years offerings.
The Festival of Altars
Every November 2nd, the Marigold Project honors our ancestors by producing the Festival of Altars in San Francisco, California. This is a community event. We recognize we are in San Francisco and invite all to participate in building an altar for their ancestors. This is a cultural sharing event.
The meaning of the Community Altars
Altars
The Day of the Dead Festival of Altars brings our communities together to celebrate our most meaningful events—life and death in one spirit. We create five community altars to symbolize our connection to the earth and our ancestors.
symbolism
Five altars are designed and built collaboratively by artists and community in all disciplines. Each shrine will represent an element, a universal symbol, and a stage of life.
East Altar
The East Altar calls the element of air, dedicated to our ancestral children. The circle is used to symbolize the interconnectedness of life and death, and white as the unifying color for all things seen and unseen.
South Altar
The South Altar summons the element of fire, devoted to our ancestral youth, and its red-hot hues and triangle symbolize strength, art, poetry, passion, and balance.
West Altar
The West Altar hails the element of water, honoring adults in tones of blue. The symbol is the square, representing rhythms of life, emotions, ocean tides, and moon cycles.
North altar
The North Altar honors the earth and our ancestors, the tones are green and purple, and the four-directional cross is the symbol. It solicits past, present, and future wisdom from the earth and our beloved Ancestors.
Center altar
The Center Altar is devoted to self-love, love in relationship to the other, community, and the universe. The symbol is the never-ending spiral, dressed in green and rainbow colors.
Marigold Project is a production of Intersection for the Arts