Every day is Day of the Dead at Secret Sugar Skull Shack

After Jamal Bara started turning out folk art inspired by Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration, her mother had a question for her.

“My mom said, ‘You’ve never been creative your entire life. What is going on?’

“I said, ‘Well, I have time to do it.’ ”

She also has a curious connection with the subject matter: For 16 years, Bara worked as a crime scene investigator for the Wichita Police Department.

“It’s interesting how it coincided,” she said.

Bara owns Secret Sugar Skull Shack, a small gift shop in Riverside. Sugar skulls are a type of traditional art that originated in Mexico to help commemorate Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a holiday in early November that honors the deceased.

Although they’re made of sugar, among other materials, most of the tiny skulls are decorative and not meant to be eaten.

They’ve also become “kind of an American pop icon or symbol — I don’t know what else to call them,” Bara said.

Bara and her mother, Fran Elliott, use various crafting techniques to put the skulls on all kind of objects, from jewelry, cards, stools, tea towels and kitchen shelves to picture frames and night lights. Other skulls, such as those housed in shadow boxes, are purely decorative.

Bara said she became interested in the sugar skull phenomenon about five years ago while visiting the American Southwest.

“I couldn’t find any in Wichita,” she said. “I thought, ‘I’m just going to have to make it.’ ”

She and her mother enjoy visiting estate sales and thrift stores to find everyday objects that can be repurposed.

“We put it on anything useful we can surround our daily life with,” Bara said. “I just love the color and the faces.”

They started out selling their creations at fairs and festivals and eventually decided they needed a space for storage. Then they decided to open that as a retail business on weekends. The shop’s name stems from its diminutive size and location, at the rear of a parking lot on 13th Street.

They’ve also started carrying representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Bara and her mother have set up booths at Day of the Dead festivals in Topeka and Tulsa. Bara, who’s of Native American origin, said she’s surprised that Wichita – with its large Hispanic population – doesn’t have a big Day of the Dead celebration.

She’s out to change that, saying she has talked with several business people and members of the Hispanic community interested in organizing one.

“It’s just kind of a way to bring this to the community, to kind of bridge the gap between white culture and Hispanic culture,” she said. “There’s so many things to admire and love about it.”

The shop has been taking part in Final Friday art crawls. And Bara said she hopes to let art students at nearby North High School make and sell work in her shop.

Bara can’t quite explain her fascination with sugar skulls.

“It’s just the idea that – this will sound so corny – that death is beautiful, I guess,” she said. “Just the liveliness of the figures.

“In American culture, everybody dreads it, they don’t want to talk about it.”

Her interest in Hispanic culture goes back to high school, when she took Spanish classes and visited Mexico. Bara taught English-as-a-second-language courses while raising her children and earning a master’s degree in anthropology from Wichita State University.

After her stint in CSI, she’s now a fingerprint expert.

“It’s all indoors and no bad smells.”

This story was originally published July 13, 2016 at 5:27 PM with the headline "Every day is Day of the Dead at Secret Sugar Skull Shack."