Catrina Dress Exhibit
A gallery of the elaborate Catrina dresses and art featured in this exhibit — browse every piece, meet the artists who made them, and the sponsors who made them possible.
Exhibit Sponsors
This exhibit is made possible by the generous support of these partners.
Opening Night — September 4 at 5:30 PM
Arts in the Sunset
For the first time, we're bringing these beautiful dresses together in one exhibit. Join us for opening night as we unveil the collection.
- Free admission
- On display through October 9
Who is La Catrina?▼
La Catrina began in 1910 as a satirical etching by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, who called her La Calavera Garbancera. Posada's joke had a sharp edge: garbanceras were Mexicans of modest means who put on European airs and looked down on their own indigenous roots — vanity that, in Posada's telling, death makes equally ridiculous.
She got the name we know her by decades later. In 1947, muralist Diego Rivera gave her a starring role in his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central ("Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park"), painting her arm in arm with Posada himself and a young version of Rivera. Rivera dressed her in a Tehuana skirt and a feathered boa echoing the god Quetzalcóatl, renamed her "Catrina" — slang for a fashionably dressed woman — and turned Posada's satire of the elite into a proud symbol of Mexican identity.
Today she's the best-known face of Día de los Muertos: an elegant reminder that death comes for everyone, however they dressed in life.
Learn more: La Calavera Catrina on Wikipedia
On Display
Opening Night — September 4 at 5:30 PM
Arts in the Sunset
For the first time, we're bringing these beautiful dresses together in one exhibit. Join us for opening night as we unveil the collection.
- Free admission
- On display through October 9
Who is La Catrina?▼
La Catrina began in 1910 as a satirical etching by Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada, who called her La Calavera Garbancera. Posada's joke had a sharp edge: garbanceras were Mexicans of modest means who put on European airs and looked down on their own indigenous roots — vanity that, in Posada's telling, death makes equally ridiculous.
She got the name we know her by decades later. In 1947, muralist Diego Rivera gave her a starring role in his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central ("Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park"), painting her arm in arm with Posada himself and a young version of Rivera. Rivera dressed her in a Tehuana skirt and a feathered boa echoing the god Quetzalcóatl, renamed her "Catrina" — slang for a fashionably dressed woman — and turned Posada's satire of the elite into a proud symbol of Mexican identity.
Today she's the best-known face of Día de los Muertos: an elegant reminder that death comes for everyone, however they dressed in life.
Learn more: La Calavera Catrina on Wikipedia