Santa Anita Reverie: The Sacred Bloom of Identity and Offering

This reinterpretation of Diego Rivera’s  Flower Festival: Feast of Santa Anita is titled  Santa Anita Reverie . While Rivera’s original work captures the ceremonial and symbolic dimensions of Indigenous culture within Mexico’s vibrant flower festivals, this conceptual rendering elevates the spiritual intimacy of the offering into a dreamlike floral portrait. Rather than focusing on the ritual crowd and floral market setting, I chose to build the piece as an interior landscape—one in which the body, the bloom, and the memory of celebration collapse into a single feminine presence. 

At the center of this visual reinterpretation is a young woman adorned in a velvet garment with ornate embroidery, representing both Rivera’s fascination with feminine beauty and Mexico’s layered traditions of dress, ceremony, and devotion. Her gaze is soft but commanding, a portrait surrounded and partially obscured by the cascading bloom of lilies, echoing the natural abundance in Rivera’s original canvas but transformed here into an ethereal canopy. These lilies—white, peach, and blush—are not simply symbols of nature; they function as spiritual conduits. They overwhelm the form gently, not strangling but sheltering, as if she has become the altar herself. 

Where Rivera’s scene emphasized collectivity and rural ritual,  Santa Anita Reverie shifts focus to inner ritual—how one becomes offering, not just giver. I layered the flowers in dense transparency, creating a sense of spiritual fog. It’s neither smoke nor cloud, but the weightless aftermath of prayer and memory. The woman is not simply watching or selling flowers—she is becoming them. Her earrings, delicate and circular, echo the golden halos often seen in iconography, reinforcing this visual sanctity. This is the Madonna of the blossoms, not in a religious sense, but in a cultural one—a sanctified figure of generational labor and reverence. 

The composition’s floral excess is intentional. Rivera’s crowded gatherings were meant to reflect social reality. Here, the crowd has disappeared. Only the essential remains: the flower, the giver, the ritual object. Through this condensation, I hoped to distill the emotional essence of Rivera’s painting and convert it into a contemporary visual poem—one that doesn’t document a festival, but rather inhabits its spirit from within. 

The color palette was central to this emotional shift. I used a soft spectrum of blush pinks, ivory, coral, and faded gold to evoke reverence and vulnerability. These colors, drawn from lilies and lace, are typically seen as delicate, but in this context they embody quiet power. The softness is deliberate—it is the softness of ancestral memory, the gentleness of a petal offered at dawn, the hushed silence that follows collective prayer. The whites of the lilies dominate the top portion, symbolizing purity, not in the moral sense, but in the ritualistic and organic—the purity of intention, of seasonal repetition, of communal devotion. Their creamy gradients reflect moonlight, memory, and breath. 

The earthy undertones below, where woven baskets and Rivera’s original flower carriers barely emerge, are rendered in subdued greens and ochres. These tones root the scene—just as Rivera grounded his subjects in Indigenous identity, labor, and place. Yet here, they are faded, ghostlike, like memories almost forgotten. These hues suggest that while the ritual endures, its context may be dissolving. The texture is more painterly than Rivera’s murals—brushed, luminous, misted at the edges to suggest that this is not a scene you observe, but one you remember in fragments. The composition is neither linear nor grounded. It floats like scent. 

There’s also a distinct duality in the portrait’s structure. The woman is half-emerged, her identity intact but partially merged with the floral body. This was intentional. I wanted to ask: where does culture live—within us, or around us? Is ritual something we perform, or something we carry? Rivera painted festivals as social expressions. Here, I paint festival as personal memory. 

When I created  Santa Anita Reverie , I thought deeply about Rivera’s Mexico, and my own. About what it means to be a keeper of beauty and tradition in a world where tradition is commodified, recorded, and edited into postcards. This piece is a quiet resistance to that. It doesn’t try to “show” the festival—it becomes the sacred air that lingers after the music stops and the petals fall. The flower becomes not a product, but a presence.