The Days of the Dead is celebrated every year on November 1st and 2nd. November 1st, known as Day of the Little Angels, honors deceased children and infants where as deceased adults are honored on the second day of November. Small shrines, elaborate alters and calacas (a colloquial Mexican Spanish name for skeleton) in many different costumes are found around this time.

Well if you just missed the Days of the Dead Festival you don't have to wait another year to experience it. Toronto's Gardiner Museum is now showing "Harvest of Memories" Mexican Days of the Dead until January 18, 2009. A richly layered multimedia exhibition, the works on display have been commissioned from some of Mexico’s most prominent popular artists: a monumental altar specially built at the Gardiner by sisters Crispina and Margarita Navarro Gomez from Oxaca, and members of the local Latin community, reproductions of prints by Guadalupe Posada and a clay tree of life by Tiburcio Soteno, colourful papier-mâché skeletons by Felipe and Leonardo Linares, pottery figures ensemble by Carlomagno Pedro Martinez, and a powerful photo essay portraying the lives of Mexican farm workers here in Ontario by award-winning Toronto photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo.

I was introduced to Carlomagno Pedro Martinez, the artist who produced the black pottery figures ensemble - an artwork that captured my eyes more than others. The work, which looks like a congregation measures about 8 ft. by 6 ft. and consists around seventy some skeleton figures. Covered with black ritual robes with multiple patterns, they gather around a well with a bell hanging above it.