Frida ama a Diego (detail),1979
Magali Lara. Photo: La Razon de Mexico.
Frida Kahlo’s life, relationships, and self-image were the subjects and driving forces of her work, disrupting the boundary between the private and the public in a way that was unusual for her time.
Decades later, her self-portraits resonated with the feminist maxim that “the personal is political.” Mexican and Chicana/o artists looked to Kahlo’s work as a starting point for new ways of thinking about intimacy, collective identities, politics, and marginalization. Artists like Magali Lara, Nahum B. Zenil, and Julio Galán built Kahlo’s legacy into the foundations of their artistic practices and social advocacy.
Join Luis Vargas-Santiago, professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, to explore how Frida Kahlo’s groundbreaking self-portraits sparked a creative revolution, influencing generations of artists to transform personal history into art that advocates for social change and collective liberation.
Programming for Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds is made possible by the Frank J. Mooney Memorial Fund.
About the Speaker
Luis Vargas-Santiago is a professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. His work focuses on Latin American and Latinx art, with an emphasis on political commemoration, image migration, social movements, and queer studies.
He has organized many exhibitions, including Emiliano. Zapata después Zapata at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, and Imágenes del Mexicano at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.
If you have any questions about programming, please reach out to museum-programs@artic.edu.
Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email access@artic.edu.
