All Call for All Dia de los Muertos Artists

Street art has become an important modern expression of Día de los Muertos, especially in Mexican and Mexican-American communities. Its history connects traditional Mexican imagery with muralism, Chicano art, graffiti, and contemporary urban culture.

The roots go deeper than modern graffiti. Indigenous peoples in Mexico maintained traditions honoring the dead long before Spanish colonization. Over centuries, those traditions interacted with Catholic observances and developed into the many regional practices now associated with Día de los Muertos. Skulls, flowers, candles, skeletons, altars, food, and remembrance became part of its evolving visual language.

A major turning point for Mexican public art came after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. The Mexican mural movement of the 1920s and later decades brought enormous paintings about Mexican history, Indigenous heritage, workers, politics, and everyday life directly onto public walls. Artists including Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros helped establish the idea that a wall could communicate culture and history to an entire community.

Another enormous influence was José Guadalupe Posada. His famous skeletal figures—especially the image that later became known as La Catrina—helped make the calavera a powerful form of social commentary. Rivera later prominently depicted Catrina in his mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park, strengthening the connection between Posada's imagery, Mexican identity, and monumental public art.

In the United States, particularly during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Mexican-American artists increasingly used public murals to express cultural pride, community history, Indigenous heritage, immigration experiences, social struggles, and Mexican identity.

Los Angeles became especially important. Neighborhood walls throughout East Los Angeles and other communities became public canvases. Día de los Muertos imagery fit naturally into this visual culture: calaveras, Aztec and Indigenous imagery, Catrinas, crosses, roses, marigolds, candles and portraits of people who had died could simultaneously communicate 

Mexican heritage and remembrance.

This is also why Día de los Muertos street art is often much more than decorative skull imagery. A mural can function almost like a public ofrenda. Instead of placing a photograph on a family altar inside a home, an artist can paint someone's portrait on a neighborhood wall, surround that person with symbolic imagery, and create a memorial visible to the entire community.

By the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Chicano mural traditions increasingly overlapped with graffiti, tattoo art, lowrider culture, aerosol painting, illustration and other forms of urban art. Artists began producing increasingly elaborate skulls and Catrinas while retaining recognizable Día de los Muertos symbols.

Today the imagery has become international. You can find Día de los Muertos-inspired murals far beyond Mexico and Los Angeles. Contemporary artists combine traditional symbolism with photorealism, lettering, graffiti, tattoo aesthetics, digital art and large-scale public murals.