Frida Kahlo has been a hero to me, from a disability point of view. I saw a large retrospective of her paintings, painting her pain, in the early 1980s, just as I was becoming ill with a severe disabling illness. I started to cry in the gallery. Luckily, only my future spouse and I were looking at the art.
Lola Alvarez Bravo, reflects society's discomfort with disability, in the opening lines of an interview used in the catalog, "The Frida Kahlo Photographs". Curated by Salomon Grimberg, from interviews he did with Bravo in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Sept. 1989.
It's the opening lines: "I get very inhibited when people have physical handicaps. I think it must bother them to have their photographs taken. So when I photographed Frida after the amputation (SA: leg) I didn't ask her directly. She told me she was going to wear a pretty little boot for the first time and she showed it to me, so I said, 'Oh what a pretty boot; if you want to, we can take its picture,' and she said, 'yes, manita' little sister, 'take its picture.' I don't know why I didn't keep the photo."
Lola Alvarez Bravo is speaking more about herself, than about Frida Kahlo. Kahlo painted herself as she was, the wheelchair and herself in paintings. (There is a good biography of Kahlo by Hayden Herrera.)
Disability disappears from view: it's not evident in the US postage stamp, which makes me sad and angry. It is "disappeared" from the doll that was being sold in recent years in the museum of women's artists of Frida Kahlo. Kahlo was injured in the bus crash in Mexico City at around age 17 and suffered for the rest of her life from the injuries sustained.
I scolded, by mail, a male reviewer who continued distortions of both women and disabled persons, when stating that Kahlo was exploiting her "illness" for attention getting in her paintings, in the paper of record, in NYC, in the late 1990s.
Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art group, has an artist named for Frida Kahlo in its anonymous members, who do actions and art on the subject of women being kept out of the art world in numbers equivalent to our existence.
Frida Kahlo has been a hero to me, from a disability point of view. I saw a large retrospective of her paintings, painting her pain, in the early 1980s, just as I was becoming ill with a severe disabling illness. I started to cry in the gallery. Luckily, only my future spouse and I were looking at the art.
Lola Alvarez Bravo, reflects society's discomfort with disability, in the opening lines of an interview used in the catalog, "The Frida Kahlo Photographs". Curated by Salomon Grimberg, from interviews he did with Bravo in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Sept. 1989.
It's the opening lines: "I get very inhibited when people have physical handicaps. I think it must bother them to have their photographs taken. So when I photographed Frida after the amputation (SA: leg) I didn't ask her directly. She told me she was going to wear a pretty little boot for the first time and she showed it to me, so I said, 'Oh what a pretty boot; if you want to, we can take its picture,' and she said, 'yes, manita' little sister, 'take its picture.' I don't know why I didn't keep the photo."
Lola Alvarez Bravo is speaking more about herself, than about Frida Kahlo. Kahlo painted herself as she was, the wheelchair and herself in paintings. (There is a good biography of Kahlo by Hayden Herrera.)
Disability disappears from view: it's not evident in the US postage stamp, which makes me sad and angry. It is "disappeared" from the doll that was being sold in recent years in the museum of women's artists of Frida Kahlo. Kahlo was injured in the bus crash in Mexico City at around age 17 and suffered for the rest of her life from the injuries sustained.
I scolded, by mail, a male reviewer who continued distortions of both women and disabled persons, when stating that Kahlo was exploiting her "illness" for attention getting in her paintings, in the paper of record, in NYC, in the late 1990s.
Guerrilla Girls, a feminist art group, has an artist named for Frida Kahlo in its anonymous members, who do actions and art on the subject of women being kept out of the art world in numbers equivalent to our existence.