Frida Kahlo in Indianapolis
Frida Kahlo followed me from San Diego, where I spent most of May and June, to Indianapolis. Indy isn’t the first city you think of when you think of the great Mexican painter. But in San Diego, it’s hard to avoid her. Just about everywhere I went in the city, I encountered murals and mosaics picturing Kahlo as a saint and an icon.
In the primarily Mexican-American neighborhood of Barrio Logan, I found the highest concentration of Kahlo murals and portraits. In Chicano Park, which is located beneath the on-ramp to the Coronado Bridge, she is pictured in multiple murals. But I was also struck by images of Frida in many other places. This included a mural advertising a food court in Old Town, on several tote bags in my parents’ house in La Jolla, and in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper. On Sunday, June 4, I read an article in the paper about an exhibit of photographs of Kahlo by Nickolas Muray in the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. (Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it to that exhibition.)
Above: Images of Frida Kahlo in Barrio Logan, San Diego
After I returned to Indianapolis, I came across a listing on Facebook for an event titled Frida Está Chida! (Frida is Cool). The venue was Tube Factory artspace, a hybrid art gallery and community center in the Garfield Park neighborhood. This celebration of all things Frida has become an annual event where you can find local artists, vendors, and musicians in a pop-up marketplace.
This event is presented by the nonprofit Arte Mexicano en Indiana. I had a chance to talk to the organization’s founder Eduardo Luna about it. In our conversation, he noted the extent of the commercialization of Frida Kahlo imagery, and how it’s possible to find the image of the Mexican artist on everything from keychains to refrigerator magnets. He wanted to bring Frida back into the Mexican American community—and the Hispanic community at large.
“What we want to do is make it grow, where eventually it would be more than just a market,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be something that can have more impact, but right now it’s the infant stages.”
The same day I talked to Luna, I visited two galleries on the First Friday artwalk. On that night the Hispanic community, which totals 116,844 according to 2020 census data, made its presence felt in those galleries.
At the Lost Dog Gallery, just west of downtown Indianapolis, a show called Keeping it Caliente opened featuring the work of seven Latina artists, which was, according to the promotional material, “a show about heat.”
The gallery was quite crowded when I arrived, with a diverse cross section of Indy gallery revelers, which might be an indicator of success for this new gallery located somewhat off the beaten path—in an office park, caddy corner to an insulation company headquarters, just east of downtown Indy.
One of the more colorful paintings in the exhibit was Dulce Cervantes’ “Tropical,” depicted a young woman at pool side in bold Miami Vice colors. The only thing that doesn’t fit the palette is the gold-metallic bottle she’s drinking from with a straw. Mary Mindiola’s “Diosa del Amor” while also evoking a tropical color palette, uses the technique of magazine collage rather than painting to get there. In contrast to the bold tropical colors of the aforementioned works, the figures in “Fiesta” by Giselle Trujillo are mere specters. What’s more, the color palette is more Gustave Klimt than Roy Lichtenstein. Despite the figures being not fully sketched out, you can make out the lustful stares of several of the male figures aimed towards the young woman wearing a sleek dress in the foreground. “Mujer” by Beatriz Vásquez, depicts a nude woman taking a selfie. Vásquez uses a technique called papel picado (perforated paper). It’s a style that takes its inspiration from Mexican folkcraft, but she uses it to comment comment on everything from the Aztec elements of Mexican culture to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Vásquez was the only one in the Lost Dog show whose work I was familiar with. In 2018, I wrote about one of her works, “La Santa Frida”—an image of which appeared along I-465 as part of the High Art Mural Program administered by the Indy Arts Council—in NUVO.
“I created ‘La Santa Frida’ during a time when she was also very much an influencer in my life while I was going through very personal and traumatic times,” Vásquez told me at the time.
The work was featured in a 2015 Gregory Hancock Dance Theatre performance of La Casa Azul, based on Frida Kahlo’s intimate diaries, which detail the many struggles she had to overcome in order to create her art. (Casa Azul is the name of the house in Mexico City where Kahlo grew up and it is now the home of the Frida Kahlo Museum.)
I talked to Vásquez as she was about to leave the exhibition, telling her how I had seen her Frida Kahlo’s image everywhere I’d gone in San Diego. I also told her about the upcoming Frida celebration at Tube Factory artspace. But she didn’t seem too excited about it, telling me she wasn’t going to go.
My next stop was the Schwitzer Gallery of the Circle City Industrial Complex, a mile north of Lost Dog, which was highlighting the work of Latina artist Mirvia Sol Eckert in an exhibition titled The Bold and the Subtle. I found her paintings to be more bold than subtle: such as her portrait of congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. You see her here in a sea of blue and green shaped like hands locked together, with the Capitol building in the background. But you can also just make out the subtle lettering of the preamble of the Constitution: We the People in the background. Also on view are portraits of indigenous Puerto Ricans, the Taino, in both grayscale and full color (Eckert is Puerto-Rican). You can see a painting titled “Our Many Never Endings,” showing environmental devastation in the background, in grayscale. But in the foreground, in full color, symbolizing hope, is a flower.
In her stylized paintings, whether in full color or grayscale, there is a certain relentless optimism.
Eckert also had a portrait of Kahlo, where she is depicted from behind, facing the horizon. She is standing with the back brace that she wore most of her life. She is holding mirrors depicting herself, her famous Mexican painter husband Diego Rivera, and the face of a skeleton. Around her are an array of flowing ribbons rising to heaven.
Titled “When I leave I can stand,” the painting reflects Kahlo’s final days on Earth.
Mirvia Sol Eckert with her painting “When I Leaves I Can Stand”
I asked Eckert why she thought Kahlo made such a compelling subject. “It’s because she’s a woman, an artist, and everything she went through,” she replied.
Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Mexico City. At the age of six she contracted polio and was confined to her bed for nine months. She first encountered renowned Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, who would become her husband, when he was painting a mural on the walls of her preparatory school in Mexico City. When she was 16, she was riding a bus when it crashed into a streetcar. She was impaled in the hip by a steel handrail and had to spend three months in a full body cast. During her recuperation, she started painting to distract herself from the pain. In 1928, she reconnected with Rivera, and she asked him to evaluate her work. They soon began a romantic relationship and were married the same year. While traveling extensively in order to accommodate Rivera’s many mural projects, she developed her art which was as intimate as his was expansive. In her work, she often depicted herself and her injuries. (Some of her injuries were presumably psychological, resulting from Rivera’s many affairs.) Her last show, her only show in Mexico City, took place in 1953. She died the following year, in her family home, La Casa Azul.
“Think about what Frida went through,” Eckert told me. “She did her last show in Mexico City, where she'd been wanting to have a show. She came to the exhibition on her bed. She refused to not go. Everyone told her, ‘Do not go. You're sick. You cannot go.’ And she was like, ‘This is my first show in my own country. I'm going.’ They rolled the bed and she went to her own show in Mexico.”
But, in her painting, you see Kahlo not readying herself for an exhibition, but for the afterlife.
And she has had quite the afterlife, as I was reminded once again when I walked into the Frida Esta Chida! event at Tube Factory artspace the next day. Walking through the front doors, I encountered two young women in floral print dresses, hair in wrapped braids and flowers in their hair. Bejeweled with necklaces and suspiciously bold unibrows, they stood by a sign advertising an upcoming performance of The Music of Casa Azul on August 5 with the Carmel Symphony Orchestra. There were other women either dressed like Frida Kahlo, or wearing Kahlo T-shirts walking around; there were vendors selling everything from jewelry to T-shirts emblazoned with her image to Mexican snacks. There was a steady lineup of musicians, Yuri Rodriguez among them, singing “La Bamba.”
I asked the Indianapolis Mexican Consulate’s Consulate General Maki Teramoto—the consulate’s first female head—what Kahlo meant to her.
“Frida Kahlo has become the biggest Mexican face in the world,” she told me. “More than Diego Rivera who is a great muralist and a great artist and a great painter. She has become a world-renowned Mexican person.”
After going to the food truck, where I ordered a cup of esquites (Mexican street corn) and a chicken taco. While waiting for my food, I met Carlota Holder, whose job was Director of Academic Language at Enlace Academy. She was wearing a Frida T-shirt. At Enlace, she said, a majority of students are Spanish-speaking. One of the school staff members, she said, had a shrine to Frida in her office.
Kahlo, Holder told me, was one of the first feminists.
It became clear to me then that Frida was chida, or cool, in many different ways to many different people.
As I was talking to Holder, the artist Beatriz Vásquez, dressed in a black dress, tapped me on the arm. “Remember you told me about this,” she said. “Well, I decided to come after all,” she said, smiling.
