Frida Kahlo2007

"Frida Kahlo's paintings and person illustrate the inevitable intertwining of freedom and pain, embodying the heroic reclamation of self and the repudiation of social repression through the art-making process. She is a woman both of her time and ours. Born in 1907, on the cusp of a new century, she was a radical in imagining and then asserting a peculiarly adventuresome artistic, sexual, and political identity. In her paintings she blurred the realms of saints and shamans as well as the cosmological and the technological, often permitting shockingly personal depictions of her physical and psychological pain to bleed into the iconography of Mexico's Aztec, colonial, and revolutionary history. This overturning of traditional approaches to thinking, seeing, and fantasizing is clear in the...