Day of the Dead workshops

Although the Day of the Dead is not until Nov. 1, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts is already working on elaborate decorations and altars that mark the celebrations of the colorful Mexican holiday. Joining forces with the San Francisco Symphony, which continues an annual tradition of a family concert on the Day of the Dead, the Mission Cultural Center is playing host to a series of hands-on workshops over the next few weeks that give kids the chance to work on large-scale community art projects, which will be exhibited in the lobby of Davies Symphony Hall in the weeks leading up to the holiday.

One of the three workshops has kids and their parents making giant animal sculptures inspired by the creatures that appear in Camille Saint-Saëns' "The Carnival of the Animals," which will also be on the program for the Nov 1. concert at Davies Symphony Hall. Workshop instructor Colette Crutcher, a local artist whose own exuberant mosaic mural "Tonantsin Renace" graces a wall at 16th and Sanchez streets, already has a menagerie going strong in the Mission Cultural Center studios.

Read more at the SF Chronicle site.

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Art anywhere: Kibera, Kenya

Today, after more than a year of planning, 2000 square meters of rooftops have been covered with photos of the eyes and faces of the women of Kibera. The material used is water resistant so that the photo itself will protect the fragile houses in the heavy rain season. The train that passes on this line through Kibera at least twice a day has also been covered with eyes from the women that live below it. With the eyes on the train, the bottom half of the their faces have be pasted on corrugated sheets on the slope that leads down from the tracks to the rooftops. The idea being that for the split second the train passes, their eyes will match their smiles and their faces will be complete.

This new work, by far JR's most ambitious to date, can be seen from space and will be seen in Google Earth.

See more at the Wooster Collective.

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