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I have always had a strange fascination with Frida Kahlo.<\/p>\nI have always had a strange fascination with Frida Kahlo.<\/p>\n
Several years ago, for a Halloween party, I donned a colorful, hand-embroidered Mexican smock, penciled in a unibrow, in her iconic style, made a crown of sorts from craft store plastic flowers and an old headband, and draped a child\u2019s toy, a stuffed red monkey, from my neck.<\/p>\n
Another party guest kept staring at me over the course of the evening, a persona she was familiar with although she wasn\u2019t sure about the name and probably had limited knowledge of the artist\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
At the end of the evening, just before this partygoer made her way to the door to leave, a look of recognition came over her face and she blurted out who she finally decided I was impersonating.\u00a0 \u201cSalma Hayek,\u201d she cried.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d I said, unable to hold back a smile. \u201cBut she played me in the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems everyone knew parts of Frida, but she was more than the sum of them. Fashionistas grabbed on to her unconventional sense of style and other artists took to her politicization of art without elevating cause over human experience.<\/p>\n
The other week, a friend invited me to trek with her out to a junior college in a distant suburb to go to an incredible retrospective of Frida\u2019s work. Most of the pieces were on loan from a museum in Mexico City.<\/p>\n
Such curated exhibits are great opportunities to connect with an artist at a deep level.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve known bits of Kahlo\u2019s story \u2014 about her bus accident when she was thirteen, about her May-December pairing with muralist Diego Rivera, about her romantic dalliances with women, her leftist politics and the rumored affair she had with Trotsky \u2014 but I never felt as keenly exposed to her world as I did at the McAninch Arts center at the College of DuPage.<\/p>\n
Despite the size of the crowd, especially large during the closing days of the exhibition, and the extra bottlenecks created by proof of vaccination check-ins, I felt privy to a very intimate experience.<\/p>\n
The exhibit was called \u201cTimeless,\u201d and I did, in fact, feel as if I stepped out of time. I took almost two hours to wander through the galleries. I imagined walking into her paintings and sketches wearing one of the odd corsets she had constructed to support her back. Several were on display.<\/p>\n
I read notes that flanked particular works and intently watched the video loops that ran on large monitors between galleries. They included clips of important people in her life at different times.<\/p>\n
A lot was made of Frida\u2019s bed habits; her sexuality, her relationships with famous men and infamous women.<\/p>\n
But I was transfixed by her bed itself, the bed where she spent so much of her time as a teenager. A large scale black and white image of her open and youthful face looking over her white quilted bed occupied an important place at the mouth of the exhibit.<\/p>\n
So much happened in her bed under the illusion of stillness and her instinct for self-care. Here, she endured pain and, perhaps, tried to find clarity despite the effects of the drugs that she took to mitigate that pain. It was here that she saw the world or saw how she could rise above it.<\/p>\n
She survived a bout of polio as a child and a serious bus accident at eighteen. It left her with spine and pelvis problems and broken bones too numerous to catalog.<\/p>\n
But being so broken is not what defined her. She created art around her pain. She allowed herself to develop her own language.<\/p>\n
I contemplated times when I felt broken. Unloved. Without prospects or great ideas.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, I journaled. I talked to God or wrote letters to my child self or made up scenes that I would like to experience. Maybe some of these scenes incorporated a little bit of something I recognized as belonging to the world I knew.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, peace came just when I allowed myself to rest.<\/p>\n
Although reflecting the historical period she was born into (she had to fight to be considered an artist, not just a \u201cwoman artist\u201d), Frida\u2019s body of work is timeless.<\/p>\n
She speaks to anyone who has ever felt broken while still carrying with them a sense of SELF that is whole and perfect.<\/p>\n
Finding inspiration and courage from a woman who transmuted her pain by delving into her imagination and self-acceptance is, indeed, no small thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have always had a strange fascination with Frida Kahlo. Several years ago, for a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[632],"tags":[639,640,190,641,54,643,642],"class_list":["post-7151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weekly-blog","tag-college-of-dupage","tag-diego-rivera-salma-hayek","tag-frida-kahlo","tag-mexico-city","tag-no-small-thing","tag-timeless","tag-trotsky","grateful-dozen-musings-imaginings","grateful-dozen-people-who-touch-me"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n