Día de Muertos 2025: Vibrant Papel Picado

Flatiron South Plaza

Join Flatiron & NoMad to celebrate Día de Muertos! From the week of October 20th – November 2nd, we’re brightening up our public spaces with a vibrant papel picado installation on the Flatiron South Plaza by Los Angeles-based artist and designer Tanya Aguiñiga. Papel picado is a traditional Mexican folk art with designs featuring flowers, animals, and skeletons.

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About Tanya Aguiñiga

Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego daily for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities. She has had major solo exhibitions at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2024); albertz benda, New York, NY (2025); Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA (2025); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2018); Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2018); among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Annenberg Space for Photography (2019) and Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (2018), among others. Aguiñiga lives in Los Angeles, California.

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About the Installation

This immersive installation by artist Tanya Aguiñiga for Flatiron & NoMad’s annual Día de Muertos celebration activates the South Plaza. Two alternating strings of papel picado form a canopy across the existing tulip installation. The artworks were designed for the site by the artist and handcut by artisans in Mexico. Across the designs read the Mexican proverb of resistance, in English and Spanish, “Quisieron enterrarnos pero no sabían que éramos semillas / They tried to bury us but they didn’t know that we were seeds.” Aguiñiga makes visual reference to marigolds and monarchs, each a significant Mexican heritage symbol, through which she invites reflection on movement, migration, and dignity throughout generations and the passages of life. Aguiñiga explores craft and its multiple connections to culture, tradition, materials, function, and community.