Celebrating Female LatinX Icons for Hispanic Heritage Month: Frida Kahlo
In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, Growing Up Miami is showcasing LatinX Female Icons that made an impact on our community. Frida Kahlo is a legend who broke down barriers for women of color and female artists.
Frida Kahlo is one of the most well known artists across the globe and is a personal hero for many Latinos especially female LatinX artists. Kahlo was a free spirit locked in a bed for most of her life due to multiple health issues. She had polio as a child, was in a terrible bus accident in her teens and had gangrene on her foot in her 40s that ended with her leg being amputated. While recuperating at home from her surgery and bedridden, her parents encouraged her to paint and built her an easel that she could use from her bed. The bus accident was the impetus for her to express herself in her artwork.
Kahlo’s work is deeply meaningful, loaded with symbology, full of honesty and inner strength. She didn’t consider herself a Surrealist until André Brenton, a leader in the Surrealist movement, told her she was, but she said “Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself. Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.” If you look at her work through that lens, the work is so rich in meaning and you can see her inner self working out the turmoil of her marriage to Diego Rivera, physical challenges, her sexuality and sometimes just being cheeky. Do yourself a favor and take a deep dive into her life and work.
Since her passing at age 47, there have been multiple occasions of resurgence in popularity. The renewed interest in her as a person and in her art work (through the 70s through 2020) highlights Frida as an icon for feminism and female creativity. She showed how one can traverse physical limitations and society’s perceptions of women and what they can accomplish, not to mention a woman in the art world, to become one of the most recognized artists ever, male or female.
“Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light.” — Frida Kahlo
Jessica Concepcion, a Miami native and co-owner of Growing Up Miami, created a limited series of linocut prints of LatinX Icons to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month. Frida Kahlo was the obvious choice to begin the series. You can view the print here.
