Subjected to inhumane working conditions, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez died at age 17 during last summer’s first heat wave. Jimenez, a farm worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, was two months pregnant during the grape harvest season in Stockton, Calif. She did not receive the required protections from her contractor and grower that included accessible drinking water, breaks in shaded areas and training to aid with heat-related illness.

Portraits of Jimenez and her fiancé, Florentino Bautista, sit above an altar designed by the Aragón Guzmán family and sponsored by Amigos Multicultural Services Center. From Jimenez’s untimely death has come a celebration of her life and awareness-raising about the preventions that could have protected her and other workers.
Jimenez’s tribute is among other altars, photographs, oil paintings, prints, etchings, sculptures and multimedia pieces on display at the 15th annual Maude Kerns Art Center’s Día de los Muertos exhibit. Made in the spirit of the two-day Mexican celebration, the show features the works of 24 artists from around the country.
More than 250 community members gathered Friday at Maude Kerns to kick off the show with a fiesta. The renovated church building was far from morose as classical guitarist Ricardo Cárdenas performed, followed by local dance groups Ballet Folklórico Alma de México and Ballet Folklórico Xochiquetzal.
Accepting mortality is central to Día de los Muertos, a joyous and festive holiday.
Robin Bachtler Cushman, a local artist, began learning Spanish in seventh grade and was introduced to Día de los Muertos traditions while studying abroad in Mexico on an archeological-anthropological project through Lane Community College. The traditions have since influenced her work.
“In my photography, I deal with nature,” she said. “In that way, I’ve been dealing with mortality for many years.”
Cushman lost her first husband to cancer when he was 41 and felt that his parents never quite moved beyond the mourning. She said it’s arduous to see younger people not get a chance to live out their lives. At the same time, Cushman noted that she had tended to many dying people, which helped her feel the spirit move on.
After her mother died two years ago at age 81, Cushman’s father looked up at her from the opposite side of the bed and told her, “This makes you the matriarch now.”
“Adios Mama” portrays Cushman wrapping her arms around a dressed skeleton. “It’s processing the tenderness, sadness and love of letting her go,” she said. “Suddenly that felt like I was taking a giant step toward mortality. I believe that our spirit lives on. It’s part of the reason I don’t see it as sad and morose.”
In her diptych, “Facing Mortality,” Cushman sits in a wooden chair looking into the camera. In the adjacent photograph, Cushman digitally collaged her image with the skeleton’s, erasing her skin to reveal the skull.
“Dying is done in nursing homes and assisted living places,” Cushman said. “It’s a shift in our culture that saddens me. We take death way too seriously. Mexican culture celebrates death in a way that makes room for love and laughter and human connection.”
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