A Housewife's Dia De Los Muertos Shrine

CLIENT: A professor of forensic pathology at the prestigious Facultad de Medicina UNAM who's wife had passed away and who still asks for his privacy and anonymity.

THE ASSIGNMENT: In September of 2016 I was given one hundred and twenty-two photographs on a thumb drive of a petite, 5' 2" Latina female, age thirty-one who had been killed while driving home from her office in the Nuclear Sciences Institute Department of UNAM in a sudden and devastating car wreck. She was the wife of the client and was a faithful celebrant of the Dia De Los Muertos holiday every November First. Her boss who was the Director of the Nuclear Sciences Institute put the grieving forensic pathologist in touch with me. The man paid half of the agreed upon price in cash, in Matamoros, one of their favorite cities to celebrate the Madi-Gras-like tradition.

The render the man wanted was not a portrait of his wife in life, but a perfect reverse-engineered anatomical drawing of her skull, tattooed in the deceased wife's favorite tattoo patterns, and enshrined in a niche incorporated into a natural cavern. What he was asking for was for me to instead of reconstructing her face in my sketch pad from her skull, he wanted me to figure out what her skull looked like, as exact a reverse-reconstruction as possible, which was then to be portrayed with the traditional art and with the traditional symbols and icons.

He had no X-rays of her head to bring with him except the somewhat crushed and thoroughly disintegrated remains of her cranial-facial foundations. I had to render a miracle and then transform it into an image both family friendly and non-upsetting to any and all relatives. Thank God he gave me three years ad unlimited access to the photo-archives of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History's (Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed Etnologia) di Firenze Skull Collection plus the University of New Mexico's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology's Osteology Reference Collections.

LOCATION: National Autonomous University of Mexico, Circuto Escolar 411A, Copilco Universidad, Coyoacán, 04360 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico.

ABOUT THE DIA DE LOS MUERTOS HOLIDAY: The Day of the Dead is a Mexican holiday celebrated in Mexico and elsewhere associated with the Catholic celebrations of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, and is held on November 1 and 2. The multi-day holiday involves family and friends gathering to pray for and to remember friends and family members who have died. The parties are both reverent and animated, colorful and flamboyant, creating a design motif like none other on Earth.

UNAM's School of Medicine is the medical school of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, located at the university's main campus of Ciudad Universitaria. Established in 1553 as part of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico, it is one of the oldest medical schools in the Americas.

The National Autonomous University of Mexico is a public research university in Mexico. It ranks highly in world rankings based on the university's extensive research and innovation. It is the largest university in Latin America and has one of the biggest campuses in the world.

DEADLINE: For the purposes of what would have been his (their) tenth wedding anniversary, he wanted the finished item along with electronic copies in a number of formats, to be delivered by courier or personally no later than 30 OCTOBER 2019.