HOUSTON, TX.- In January 2026, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will debut Frida: The Making of an Icon, featuring over 30 works by Frida Kahlo and more than 120 by artists from the 1970s onward; artists who were driven by her artistic legacy and personal history to adopt and adapt her work and her image to their own ends.
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Conceived and organized by MFAH curator Mari Carmen Ramírez, the exhibition will tell the extraordinary story of how Kahlo, little recognized during her lifetime, became one of the world’s most influential artists decades after her death. While she was practically unknown to mainstream audiences when she died, in 1954, from the mid-1970s onward varied social, political, cultural, and market forces converged to enshrine Kahlo as the only woman artist whose instant audience recognition and mass appeal rival those of male artist icons Van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol.
Frida: The Making of an Icon, which travels to the Tate Modern, London, after Houston, is the first exhibition to trace the artist’s transformation from a relatively unknown local painter to a universal icon and global brand. It will feature more than 200 works, including over 30 by Kahlo, to illustrate how the artist’s legacy has evolved through and inspired the work of generations of artists practicing within artistic and social movements from the mid-1970s through to present day. Documents, photographs and memorabilia–including the artist’s clothing, jewelry and other personal items–culled from Kahlo’s archives and other sources will provide additional context for the art in the show. Key contributions from the archives of the Documents Project of the ICAA (International Center for the Arts of the Americas) at the MFAH and Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City will be featured. A significant catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with essays by 14 contributors across a range of social, historical, and art-historical perspectives.
Commented Gary Tinterow, director and Margaret Alkek Williams chair of the MFAH, “This Museum has been at the forefront of Latin American art since the founding in 2001 of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas. While there have been numerous Frida Kahlo exhibitions around the world since the 1970s, Mari Carmen Ramírez has leveraged the unparalleled resources of our ICAA to document and assemble a fascinating group of objects that attest to the enduring appeal of Kahlo’s art and life.”
“Frida: The Making of an Icon attempts to separate Frida Kahlo the artist from Frida Kahlo the phenomenon,” commented Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the MFAH and founding director of the Museum’s International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). “The exhibition reveals how the different facets of Kahlo’s complex persona(lity), which she so carefully crafted and projected, were adapted again and again over her decades-long transformation into an icon. As a result, her image became subsumed within the desires, fears, and hopes of artists and activists who transformed it into innovative proposals that transcend their source of inspiration while commenting on pressing issues of their place and time. In exploring that process, the exhibition re-establishes Kahlo’s own identity, and asserts her persistent relevance to contemporary art as well as activism over the past 70 years.”
Frida: The Making of an Icon will be organized along seven themes that address how artists across five decades have responded to Kahlo’s work and appropriated aspects of it, with each of the artists represented in the exhibition having an acknowledged relationship to Kahlo’s work.
Construction/Self-Construction This first section will introduce the artist’s depictions of her “many selves”: the dedicated wife, the intellectual, the modern artist, the activist, the physically challenged woman. Ten Kahlo paintings presage the exchange with and influence of the artist on her contemporaries and artists from later movements.
Photographs by noted photographers of the period and ephemera from the artist’s archive, including a selection of her Mexican Indigenous dresses and jewelry, provide additional context.
Surreal Affinities Kahlo had a fraught relationship with the Surrealist movement and its co-founder, writer André Breton. She did not consider herself a Surrealist painter, but exhibited her work with members of the group beginning in 1938. She also shared affinities with several of the women Surrealists, expressed through idiosyncratic self-portraits and symbolic still-lifes that she considered naturalezas vivas or “living still-lifes.” Work by Jacqueline Lambda, Leonor Fini, Kati Horna, and Mexicans Olga Costa, María Izquierdo, and Rosa Rolanda are included here.
On the Other Side of the Border It was the advent of the Chicano/a movement, in the mid-1970s, that prompted Kahlo’s work to circulate broadly in the United States. Mexican- American artists adopted her as a standard-bearer for their own causes and used her likeness on self-portraits, murals, altars, protest posters, and other promotional materials. Emerging out of the political and ideological struggles of the Civil Rights movement, these artists, including Rupert García, Yreina Cervántez, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Carmen Lomas Garza, Carlos Almaraz, Marcos Raya, and Joey Terrill, considered Kahlo a revolutionary hero. Since then, generations of Chicano/a artists have channeled Kahlo through paintings, films, photographs, and multi-media performances, with murals across Los Angeles and elsewhere celebrating her.
Gendered Dialogues The rise of feminist and gay-rights activism in Mexico and the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s provided the ideal context for artists to embrace her persona as a counterpoint to the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. This section of the exhibition will explore the relationship of Kahlo’s art to the work of leading Mexican and American women artists active between 1970 and today. In Mexico, this includes Magali Lara and Monica Mayer; in the U.S., feminist art pioneers Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro, as well as Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, the Guerrilla Girls, Delilah Montoya, Carrie Mae Weems, Catherine Opie, Judy Baca, and ORLAN who have all cited Kahlo as a major influence on their artistic practice.
Neo-Mexicanisms From the late 1980s through the 1990s, a volatile economic and activist context in Mexico fostered a new generation of Mexican artists loosely grouped under the banner of “Neo-Mexicanismo” (New Mexicanism). The richly varied work of these artists drew upon Kahlo’s legacy in their return to oil painting and figuration with a focus on self- portraiture, Indigenous myths, and folk art, particularly ex-votos, or votive offerings. This portion of the exhibition will feature works by leading Neo-Mexicanists of this period, including Julio Galán, Nahum Zenil, Rocío Maldonado, Dulce María Nuñez, Georgina Quintana, Lucía Maya, and Adolfo Patiño.
A Pro-Activist Legacy Artists from all over the globe have turned in recent decades to Kahlo and her work’s relevance in the context of racism, gender biases, and social inequality. Artists who identify with marginalized communities have taken inspiration from Frida’s forging her own path and her relentless self-fashioning. In 1989, foundational performance artists Yeguas del Apocalipsis introduced their take on Kahlo’s acclaimed The Two Fridas as a symbol of care and affect in times of crises, while disabled artists have used Frida’s story as a source of courage and self-determination.
Fridamania A gallery within the exhibition addresses the commodification of every aspect of Kahlo’s art, life, and personal image—a cultural phenomenon with roots in the popular success of Hayden Herrera’s 1983 Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, later largely driven by the licensing reach of the Frida Kahlo Corporation, and now known as “Fridamania.” The selection will be assembled from merchandise acquired from commercial outlets and loans and memorabilia from private collections. It will include a range of customized items, from mugs, bags, T-shirts, and socks, to jigsaw puzzles, a Barbie doll, flags, posters, jewelry, cosmetics, and macramé wall hangings. This section presents an overview of the status of Frida as an iconic, pop-culture figure who is embraced by fashion designers, musicians, celebrities, and politicians seeking to identify with the immediate associations she evokes.
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