La tercera fiesta anual de Frida

Two years ago I decided I needed a fiesta to liven up the slow season and what better occasion to celebrate than Frida Kahlo’s birthday. There are prizes for the best Frida costume. Last year the movie “Frida” played on the television.

Join us at Brenda’s Bar starting at 5pm. Pedro Ascencio Y Augustine Ramírez.

Frida championed Mexicanidad, a post-Revolutionary movement that called for stripping the country of colonial influence and replacing it with the trappings of indigenous culture. It was in this spirit that Kahlo dressed herself, painted, and even gardened. On most days, she donned traditional Tehuana clothes, elaborately patterned skirt-and-blouse ensembles native to Oaxaca. Many of her paintings took cues from age-old Mexican votive panels, and she and Rivera re-planted their yard to include only native plants.

Senorita Kahlo was married twice to the Mexican painter Diego Rivera. “I had two serious accidents in my life. One was caused by a bus, the other was Diego.”

“Doctor, if you let me drink this tequila, I promise I won't drink at my funeral."

“Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they’re not at all the same. But they’re both symptoms inside the white male power structure."

Frida Kahlo had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.

Kahlo's work as an artist remained relatively unknown until the late 1970s, when her work was rediscovered by art historians and political activists. By the early 1990s, not only had she become a recognized figure in art history, but she was also regarded as an icon for Chicanos, the feminism movement, and the LGBTQ+ community (she was bisexual). Frida Kahlo's work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience and form.