As part of Gloria Molina Grand Park’s Downtown Día de los Muertos, join us for a special evening altar tour and paper flower-making workshop—an opportunity to explore the beauty, history, and resilience, and meaning behind this sacred celebration of life and remembrance.
Our evening in Gloria Molina Grand Park will begin with traditional limpias (spiritual cleansings) from Ohtli Yollotl Curanderismo Collective, followed by a guided tour of the altars with artist and curator Consuelo G. Flores. After the tour, she’ll lead a paper flower-making workshop so you can craft a cempasúchil to take home for a personal altar. We’ll also have a specially-curated beverage menu from Cafe Alegria and pan dulce for all. Guests are invited to bring a remembrance to add to the community altar in the park* and to stick around to enjoy the park and altars after the event as well.
Downtown Día de los Muertos is on view daily from October 24 through November 2, 2026, presented by Gloria Molina Grand Park.
From Consuelo G. Flores:
“As we move through the altar installations, we’ll explore the traditional and contemporary practices of Día de los Muertos, beginning with its Indigenous roots in Ancient Mexico and following its evolution through colonization, cultural resistance, migration, and Chicano cultural expression in the United States. Each altar offers a window into the ways communities remember, mourn, celebrate, and heal. We’ll consider the altar as both a deeply personal expression of love and remembrance and a powerful social and cultural tool—one that can honor lives lost, acknowledge grief and violence, preserve cultural identity, and celebrate the resilience of our communities. Along the way, we’ll reflect on the three enduring ideas at the heart of the celebration: remembering those we love, recognizing the shared journey of life and death, and valuing, nurturing, and celebrating all life. After the tour, we’ll gather together to create paper flowers, one of the vibrant elements often found on Día de los Muertos altars. The hands-on workshop offers an opportunity to connect with the tradition through making, creativity, and community. Whether you are familiar with Día de los Muertos or discovering it for the first time, this experience invites you to learn, reflect, create, and celebrate the lives and memories that connect us.”
About Consuelo G. Flores
Consuelo G. Flores is an East Los Angeles-born multidisciplinary artist, writer, and master altarista, who has been a prominent culture bearer in Southern California since the 1980s. Emerging from Self Help Graphics & Arts, she uses folk art to connect ancestral traditions with contemporary social justice and community healing.
Since 2021, Flores has curated and designed the central community altar installations at Gloria Molina Grand Park. Her work has been exhibited internationally and at major Los Angeles institutions, including Craft Contemporary and the LA Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Flores approaches Día de los Muertos as a fluid, evolving tradition, adapting the ofrenda to reflect contemporary experiences of grief, remembrance, and resistance. Over the decades, she has created large-scale public altars honoring victims of the AIDS crisis, the Pulse Nightclub shooting, the 2014 Ayotzinapa student massacre, and the Uvalde school shooting. Her 2021 installation Roots of Our Resistance used intertwined tree roots and paper flowers to commemorate Black and Latino communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19 while highlighting systemic inequities.
Known for pushing beyond the traditional, Flores uses sculptural forms to deepen an installation’s narrative. For her Uvalde tribute, she shaped the altar as a woman’s body to symbolically hold the children’s souls while honoring the teachers and mothers left behind. At Grand Park, she created enormous floating wings made entirely of marigolds to represent generations of families lost during the pandemic.
Flores holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University and works across poetry, writing, paper fashion, theater, and visual art. Through these mediums, she continues to preserve the sacred roots of Día de los Muertos while expanding its role as an inclusive, evolving practice for honoring the dead and healing the living.
*Please note, contributions to the community altar will not be returned at the end of the installation, so please refrain from bringing originals or anything you can’t part with!
Accommodations
LAist is committed to providing access and accommodation for individuals with disabilities at our events. To request accommodations, please email events@laist.com or call us at (626)583-5222 at least 7 days in advance of the event.
