Frida Kahlo is known for her colorful self-portraits exploring themes of human suffering, identity and Mexican culture. Her iconic appearance, marked by flower crowns and Tehuana dresses, is recognizable all over the world, and she has become one of the most famous women painters of all time. However, a new exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art is asking visitors how well they really know Kahlo.
The show, “ Frida: Beyond the Myth ,” hopes to pull back the curtain and paint a more intimate picture of the artist. “We’re basically trying to tell the full story,” Sue Canterbury , the exhibition’s co-curator, tells the Dallas Observer ’s Carly May Gravley. “She wasn’t forthcoming.
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She was very misleading at times. Trying to reveal some of those aspects about her and her life [is] key to this exhibition.” Kahlo was known to exaggerate certain details about her life in her art and interviews.
For example, she often said she was born the same year as the Mexican Revolution in 1910—even though she was actually born three years earlier. “Through this persistent self-fashioning, Kahlo was, in essence, the architect of her own myth—a myth that she was ultimately devoured by,” says Canterbury in a statement from the museum. “It is only through the eyes of those around her that we are able to get closer to who she really was, seeing her as she was seen and not only as she saw herself.
” The show features 30 artworks by Kahlo alongside photographs of her..
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