Sugar Skulls
Taught by Nancy Tompkins
Nancy Tompkins is a visual artist and an elementary school art teacher who was raised in Greenwich Village and Mexico City. She studied at Bennington College, The School of Visual Arts, Instituto Allende (Guanajuato, Mexico) and Massachusetts College of Art. She knows how to do a lot of things, and she is one of a small handful of people in the world who doesn't live in Brooklyn.
!Orale! Just in time for the Day of the Dead (Nov. 1-2)…let’s make Mexican sugar skulls!
Italian friars brought the art of molding sugar to Mexico, a country rich in sugarcane, in the 18th century. Molded sugar was originally used to make angels and animals for Easter or Christmas celebrations, but the people of Mexico put their own spin on things. Sugar skulls are true Mexican folkart: a strange, delightful, and colorful mashup of Old World confectionary skills and Aztec death worship imagery.
We'll demo how to mix, mold, scoop, and decorate sugar skulls, and you will have your very own skull to decorate with a variety of frostings and take home.