Viva Las Artes!
If there is a part of the world known for its passion for life, it's Mexico, and if there is one artist that embodies Mexico, it's Frida Kahlo. Everything from her political and social activism to her art is an ode to life. Heck, her life was an ode to life! Her perseverance, indomitable spirit, creative fire through the constant pain, and storytelling gave texture and substance to her art and her existence in a way that transcended time and borders.
She wasn't the first female Mexican artist, though. Take Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz for instance. Born in 1648, She was a writer, poet, and philosopher of the Baroque period and a nun. One of her most famous pieces, "Primero sueño," is a long philosophical poem. Aside from poetry and philosophy, she was interested in the natural sciences, mathematics, and music theory. She even wrote a treaty, sadly lost, in which she outlined ways to simplify musical notation and solve problems associated with tuning. Nothing less!
Aurora Reyes Flores, contemporary of Frida, was raised in a military family during the Mexican revolution, became a respected painter and writer, and was the first female muralist in Mexico. She had her first exhibition at the Mexican ARS Gallery in 1925 and contributed works to collective exhibitions in France, Cuba, and the United States.
María Izquierdo was another Frida's contemporary. Diego Rivera (Frida's husband) even praised her work. She was already a single mother of three children when her portraits and mystical surrealist paintings began to make waves in Mexico City in the '30s. In 1930, she outran Kahlo and became the first Mexican female artist to host a solo exhibition in New York.
The "Frida-mania" started within the feminist movement in the '70s and reached every corner of the arts up to over-commercialism. Luckily, Frida's legacy is strong enough to keep on inspiring and influencing several new generations of female painters, writers, photographers, illustrators, sculptors, and movie directors.
Hilda Palafox is an illustrator from Coyoacán in Mexico City who used to walk by La Casa Azul [Kahlo's home] almost every day. Later, when she started her own artistic path, she felt inspired by her work and some other great Mexican artists such as Guadalupe Posadas or Nahui Olin.
Arantxa Rodriguez is a painter, performance artist, and sculptor born and raised in Mexico City, Mexico, familiar with Frida Kahlo since she was a little girl. Before moving to NYC, she worked as a tour guide in the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City; as part of their private collection, they have one of Frida's most important paintings, "Las dos Fridas."
Erika Harrsch is probably the contemporary painter, photographer, and sculptor who is the most eloquent about Frida: "Starting my career as a young painter in Mexico, Frida was an unquestionable reference. She was a heroine for having expressed herself with such honesty and strength, among an implacably male-macho-oriented art time, surrounded by the masters-monsters-muralists. Frida's self-portraiture was fascinating and liberating for the young painting student I was. Her unrestrained figurative representations and visual honesty in her paintings express the most intimate aspects of a person's pain, love, life, and death. It inspired me to do many self-portraits filled with symbolism and biographical representations at the beginning of my career. She represents the invincible female persona that was only going to be defeated by illness and death and, even so, she transcended her painful life experiences and turned it into art."