RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 2.14.26 FRIDA: THE MAKING OF AN ICON

The impressive exhibit Frida: The Making of an Icon at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston traces Frida Kahlo’s posthumous evolution from a relatively unknown Mexican painter to a multifaceted global icon and brand. Mari Carmen Ramirez, the main curator of the exhibit, organized the show into seven sections. Each selection addresses the reception and projection of Kahlo’s works, exploring how this dynamic engagement helped shape Frida’s iconic status. Ramirez noted in her introduction to the exhibit book, Frida: The Making of an Icon, that the “Frida phenomenon is unlike anything else in past or recent history. It is not limited to Kahlo’s art-making but extends to all aspects of her social image, innermost character, as well as her attire.”

In addition to numerous paintings by Frida Kahlo loaned from Museums in Mexico, the US, and private collections, the Museum of Fine Arts exhibition features over 80 intergenerational artists from around the world. Mari Carmen Ramirez aimed to place Kahlo’s art in dialogue with these artists, some of whom were her contemporaries, while others had not yet been born at the time of her death in 1954. The curators proposed that all artists included have or had “an acknowledged relationship to Frida, whom they consider a core reference.” Featured artists, noted the curators, “recast their appropriations of Kahlo’s facial and bodily features, motifs, or stylistic elements into innovative proposals that transcend their inspiration to comment on pressing issues of their own place and time.”

Frida, now a recognized world-famous artist, was born in Mexico City in 1907. Her father was German-born photographer Carl Wilhelm [Guillermo] Kahlo. Her mother was Mexican-born Matilde Calderón y González, a mestiza from Oaxaca with Indigenous and Spanish ancestry. Frida often emphasized her mother’s heritage when constructing her own public identity as Mexican and mestiza. She frequently wore a Tehuana dress, highlighting Indigenous roots in her self-portraits. At age 22, Frida married the world-famous artist Diego Rivera. He was 20 years her senior.

 

Frida Kahlo is known for establishing unique and creative art styles to construct and project a multifaceted persona. The curators explained, “From early on, she rejected the notion of a fixed identity, wielding her art and appearance to project a multivalent sense of Self, which included: the avant-garde artist and intellectual, the liberated flapper, the self-taught painter, the mestiza, the political activist, the enamored and devoted wife, the bisexual woman, the transgressor, and the disabled artist.”

Over her lifetime, Frida Kahlo created more than 100 paintings. Many of her self-portraits enhanced her notoriety for her distinctive attitude toward her disabled body and nonconforming sexuality. The Museum of Fine Arts curators noted that in numerous self-portraits, Frida “depicts herself with a slight mustache and a unibrow, often wearing dresses and braided hair but occasionally in masculine garb with cropped hair.”

When Andre Breton, theoretician and leader of the Surrealist art movement, invited Frida Kahlo to show in Paris in 1938, the exhibit brought her, for the first time, international attention. Mari Carmen Ramirez noted that before the Paris show, Kahlo had never had a solo exhibition, did not consider herself a professional artist, and had sold few works. “Her experiences in New York and Paris,” wrote Ramirez in the Fine Arts exhibit catalogue, “encouraged her to become a painter in her own right, subsequently presenting herself as Frida Kahlo and not Frida de Rivera.”

For the New York and Paris exhibitions, Frida produced a new body of work that included “Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky.” Trotsky, a Marxist revolutionary strategist and writer, helped lead the Russian Revolution and later opposed Stalin’s rise to power. Trotsky spent the last years of his life in exile in Mexico, arriving in 1937. He was granted asylum by President Lázaro Cárdenas after Stalin forced him from the Soviet Union. He initially lived with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo at the Casa Azul. During his stay at their home in 1937, he had a brief romantic affair with Frida. Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacán, Mexico City, in August 1940.

Following the publication of Hayden Herrera’s masterpiece, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, published in 1983 by Harper & Row and its translation into twenty-five languages, Frida became a global sensation. The world further learned about Frida following her prominent inclusion in the 1990 exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. My wife Harriett and I saw “Splendors” at the San Antonio Museum of Art and at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Herrera’s book and the Splendors exhibition, organized collaboratively by major New York, San Antonio, and Los Angeles museums, boosted Frida’s rise as a cultural icon and coincided with the rise of feminism in the United States and Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s. Frida’s artistic works and the many identities explored through self-presentation in her paintings and dress styles “provided the perfect context for intellectual and artistic engagement with Frida and the validation of her transgressive Self,” noted the Fine Arts Museum curators.

Frida: The Making of an Icon stands as an artistic marvel of the 21st century. The imagery is so powerful that one’s first thought after leaving the exhibit is to return to see it again. The impressive collection of her art demonstrates the ways Frida evolved as an artist. In her 1931 painting “Frida y Diego,” she places herself petite and clearly in the shadow of Diego. In the powerful 1946 painting “The Wounded Deer,” Frida represents herself as an injured deer with multiple arrows through her body. In a 1949 painting, she cuddles Diego Rivera like an infant in her lap.

Frida: The Making of an Icon is a remarkable art and history exhibition. In addition, our knowledge of Mexican art and its worldwide influences has been greatly enhanced by the extensive catalogue. Viewing the exhibition and reading the well-researched essays in the catalogue gave Harriett and me a greater understanding of the phenomenal impact and commercialization of Frida Kahlo.

In the words of Mari Carmen Ramirez, “Kahlo’s struggles as a disabled woman, distraught lover, and striving artist echo those of millions of individuals around the world, making possible her transmutation into a symbol of resilience to gender biases, physical ailments, professional marginalization, and hardship.” Frida’s legacy is kept alive in memory of her remarkable qualities and in her complex artistic expressions of life experiences.

In my next essay, I will explore how Frida inspired Chicano and Latino artists in the United States. I will begin with analyzing the excellent essay “Chicana Frida” by Adriana Zavala and Angelica Becerra.

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All image credits as indicated above.