Altars for Collective Grief
A space to grieve together.
A place to honor the living.
Rooted in care.
Mission
Altars for Collective Grief is a community-based, care-centered project honoring people who are still alive yet living with absence—through deportation, separation, displacement, incarceration, illness, or other forms of forced distance.
This work creates temporary and ongoing altars as acts of remembrance, resistance, and love. Each altar is shaped in collaboration with participants, guided by consent, memory, and the everyday details that make a person who they are.
We understand grief not as something to be resolved, but as something to be held together.
Altars are spaces of pause.
They make room for what is often
pushed aside or made invisible.
In many cultures, altars are places
where the living and the absent remain
in relationship. They hold memory, prayer, longing, and care at the same time.
In this project, altars become a way
to honor people who are not gone,
but are not fully present people
whose lives continue across borders, systems, and distance.
These altars are not monuments.
They are gestures of care.
Sanos Southwest Team Volunteering on Altar Install Day,
February 1st, 2026
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