Annual Day of the Dead festival with ofrendas, food, flowers and activities honoring ancestors at the Penn Museum.
Día de los Muertos CultureFest! returns to the Penn Museum on Saturday, October 24, from 10 AM to 4 PM. It's the festival's 15th year, and it's built around the Mexican tradition of remembering ancestors through ofrendas, food, flowers, and photographs. The museum traces the holiday's roots back 3,000 years to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, where Indigenous Mexican beliefs eventually blended with the Catholic celebrations of All Saints' and All Souls' Day. The imagery—the calacas and calaveras—has reached a global audience through films like Disney's Coco.
This year's ofrenda, When Spirits Dance: A Tribute to Amalia Hernández, is by artists Pamela Plata and Juanita Aguilar. It honors Hernández, the Mexican choreographer who founded the Ballet Folklórico de México. The day is filled with more than just the altar: there's music by Esmeralda LaCor, a performance by Danza Tonantzin, and bilingual storytelling presentations of La Catrina Monarca: El Vuelo Sagrado de las Almas/A Sacred Flight at 12 PM and 2:20 PM. Toward the end of the afternoon, there are free samples of pan de muerto and Mexican hot chocolate at 3:15 PM, and the winners of the Community Altar Contest are announced at 3:30 PM. For families, there's a Family Adventures gallery activity. The Mexican Cultural Center is the event partner.
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Admission is included with your Penn Museum ticket. It's free for museum members, PennCard holders, Penn Medicine patients and staff, and children 5 and under. The museum is at 3260 South St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
