On July 12, 2021, I experienced the Frida Kahlo TIMELESS exhibit at the Cleve Carney Museum at the College of DuPage in Wheaton, Illinois — an exhibition which was originally scheduled for July 2020 and titled “Frida 2020”, but postponed because of the global COVID-19 Pandemic. My original ticket was specifically chosen for the anniversary of her death — July 13th, 2020 [1954] and for the exhibition events CCMA had planned for that day.

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I spent more than three hours in the exhibit — entering the gallery anew three times during my visit in order to re-experience and fully drink in her work for the first-time ever — her paintings, her drawings, her fotos, her possessions — from the collection entrusted to Dolores Olmedo; I walked the galleries in reverse once to shift my experience and perspective.

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The accompanying exhibit of the historical timeline and personal narrative of Kahlo’s life before and with, without, and reunited with her beloved/beloathed (depending) — husband, artist Diego Rivera, and the archive — including reproductions of her fotos, bed, treasured objects and clothing was comprehensive, wondrous and satisfying.

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Frida Kahlo was from the very, very beginning, an outlier — a gender-bending brilliant, talented girl and young woman;

and she became a supremely unique artist — much of it — born from experiencing and enduring immense physical pain as a woman:

including multiple surgeries, lengthy immobilized convalescences, at least two miscarriages/abortions, frequent medical/surgical interventions and permanent disability during her adult life;

she had also survived childhood polio and was suspected to have been born with spina bifida; she survived a devastating bus accident —- those events contributing to and culminating decades later into gangrene and amputation of her precious leg.

yet,

she was an impassioned and committed intellectual and communist — committed to the cause, dialectic, and praxis — and a creative, artistic, political, bi-sexual and cultural force – throughout her relatively short life.

her brilliance and originality were largely under-recognized and under-appreciated during her own lifetime; but she was seen and known — by keenly appreciative and attentive men: the two most influential: her father, first — and then vitally, by Diego Rivera;

the dialogue, the confidence and support she received from those two in no small part,

enriched and informed her life and art.

I raise a glass and tend altars and gardens to her today — and always, especially throughout July.

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