For me, this project was more interesting and informative rather than difficult. I had a lot of fun learning about the Day of The Dead and the culture and history of it. I was very interested in learning about the reason why it was celebrated because I had already known what it was, but I didn't know how it came to be or why it is a holiday. While the work was quite time consuming and we did have to take some notes, I wouldn't call it difficult. It was more of a fun thing to learn about and celebrate.
While learning and being a part of this project, I enjoyed writing down and learning all about the origin of the holiday specifically. I had always been curious of what the celebration was about, I knew that it was to remember the dead, but I had no idea what the altars and flowers and other aspects were for or represented. I was curious and eager to learn more about this holiday and I enjoyed learning about the different aspects of the holiday and what they represented.
Some critique that I got on my project was for my ofrenda or altar. My classmates and I went around and critiqued each other's work while being kind, specific, and helpful. As that suggests, the critique that I received was extremely helpful and helped me notice some aspects of my altar that I could improve that I hadn't noticed previously. One of these being that I needed to add some more decorations to the walls and maybe move my artists statement down a bit so it would be easier to see. All of the critique that I received, was very encouraging and helpful, which overall helped me improve my final product.
The grade that I think I deserve for this project is an A- because although I think I could have done better on my ofrenda, I think that the quality and effort that I put in most of my work was pretty well done. I do wish that I had some more time to work on specific assignments, but I think that, given the time that I had, I used it pretty wisely. My notes were neat, detailed, and on the tests I had everything ready, prepared, and I did pretty well.
Something that I would've changed was maybe the amount of how challenging the work was. Although I love taking notes, it was a little simple to just write things down. To test their ability to remember what we've learned, maybe have a quiz on Dia De Los Muertos. Other than that, I had a great time learning about this holiday and what it represents culturally.
Artist Statement
My ofrenda honors my dog Josie who I had as a child and all growing up. She was very special to me and I loved her very much. As a kid I would pet her and play with her in the backyard, I remember having so much fun just running around with her and I miss her very much. My parents took her home as a puppy around 2002 and she died in 2013, and because she was the runt of her pack they didn’t think that she would live long. She was the size of my momś hand and because they thought she was so special, they decided to take her home. My mom has so many pictures of me as a baby with her laying next to me and us walking around together, she was a very special dog and very significant to my childhood. In my ofrenda I have a picture of her and candles, there are also some flowers and plants because I always associated her with this one part of our house where she always sat and looked out the window. She used to sit by the backyard door and look out at our rose plants and all the other flowers we had out there. I painted the box white because that is the color of the door, I was trying to maybe recreate that scene a little bit with the flowers and the white doors. She also had this bell that she would always ring when she wanted to go out. My mom trained her to ring it because she didn’t want her to bark a lot. She would ring the bell and sit next to the door patiently until we would take her out.