Frida Kahlo

Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, who lived from 6 July 1907 to 13 July 1954, was a Mexican painter known for her portraits, self-portraits and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico, employing a naive folk art style drawn from the country's popular culture to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class and race, with paintings that carried strong autobiographical elements mixing realism with fantasy; she has been described variously as belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, as a surrealist and as a magical realist, and is known also for painting her experience of chronic pain. Born in Coyoacan to a German father and a mestiza mother of Purepecha descent, she contracted polio in 1913, which left her disabled, and had been a promising student headed for medical school until a bus accident at age eighteen caused lifelong pain and medical problems; during her recovery she returned to her childhood interest in art and approached the muralist Diego Rivera, whom she had met years earlier, for his opinion on whether she should pursue painting, and the two began courting soon after. She joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927, married Rivera in 1929, and through the following decade developed her artistic style; the surrealist Andre Breton arranged her first solo exhibition at New York's Julien Levy Gallery in 1938, followed by one in Paris in 1939 where the Louvre purchased her painting The Frame, making her the first Mexican artist featured in its collection. Kahlo's work remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when it was rediscovered by art historians and political activists, and by the early 1990s she had become both a recognized figure in art history and an icon for Chicanos, the feminist movement and the LGBTQ+ community; her 1953 solo exhibition in Mexico, her first there, came shortly before her death in 1954 at age forty seven.