Giant Marigold Ofrenda 'Twenty Petal Flower' Blooms in Flatiron

A monumental ofrenda titled "Twenty Petal Flower" begins blossoming in Manhattan's Flatiron North Plaza today, October 26 — six days before the start of Día de Muertos, the Day of the Dead. The installation stays open through November 3, and it's built to be used, not just looked at.

An ofrenda is a Mexican altar where families honor loved ones who have died. This one works as a public community altar: visitors can place offerings, candles, gifts, and mementos of their own deceased relatives directly onto the structure. The project is a partnership between the Flatiron NoMad Partnership and Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, with the artwork itself made in Mexico.

Artisans from Mestiz Studio, based in San Miguel de Allende, wove the tiered arrangement into enlarged marigolds. The flower choice is literal and linguistic at once. The title "Twenty Petal Flower" translates the Mexican marigold's name in Nahuatl, cempōhualxōchitl, and echoes its Spanish form, cempasúchil. In Día de Muertos tradition, marigolds are thought to help guide the souls of the deceased back to their living family members each year. So the sculpture is a scale model of the tradition's own signal flower.

What does this change for the public?

It moves a domestic ritual into open civic space. Instead of building an altar at home, anyone walking through Flatiron can participate — the piece only completes itself once visitors add their offerings. That's the mechanism Valero's studio built into the design: the woven marigold tiers are the frame, and the community's mementos become the content.

Daniel Valero, founder and creative director of Mestiz, framed the project as a tribute to labor as much as to loss.

"A Día de Muertos altar is traditionally a tribute to someone we love who is no longer with us. With Twenty Petal Flower, we wanted to honor the people behind the cempasúchil's entire journey, from cultivation to the ofrenda."

That quote carries the concept. The studio isn't only memorializing the dead. It's crediting the living chain of hands — the growers, the harvesters, the weavers — that brings the marigold from field to altar. Photographs from the build show artisans weaving the altar's component parts by hand, each petal-form constructed before assembly in the plaza.

The collaboration also maps a production route: designed and woven in San Miguel de Allende, realized with Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, and installed in Manhattan. Images of the finished work, including a digital rendering of the ofrenda in the plaza, come courtesy of Mestiz Studio and the Flatiron NoMad Partnership.

The timing is tight to the calendar. With Día de Muertos beginning six days after the October 26 opening, the altar will fill with offerings right through the holiday and close on November 3 — one of the largest-scale communal ofrendas Manhattan has hosted in a public plaza.