How Frida Kahlo Created Frida Kahlo

“It’s a well-known fact that Kahlo would revise her year of birth (1907, according to her birth certificate), to align it with the eruption of the Revolution in 1910; what we don’t tend to appreciate is the way in which she consciously drew on Mexico’s religious and cultural traditions to shape her political and self-expression. Kahlo may have scoffed at a photograph of her solemn younger self dressed elaborately for church but, as time went by, forms of ritual, Catholic iconography, and cultural memory would structure her highly personal responses to her changing country.”