Jacqueline LopezOaxaca’s Sacred Keeper: María Sabina

A layered collage installation honoring the Oaxacan healer María Sabina, made for Día de los Muertos.

Lopez builds a single layered collage around María Sabina, the Oaxacan healer and ceremonial keeper, treating her less as a portrait than as an offering and a threshold between the living and the ancestral dead. Botanical forms, mushrooms, candles, smoke and celestial imagery dissolve into one another.

Papel picado patterns, textile motifs and amate-like textures draw on Oaxacan folk traditions. The work is shown in celebration with San Rafael Dia de los Muertos and draws on the artist’s own altar-making and her grandfather’s folk medicine.

Full details at artworksdowntown.org