Responding to art

Today in class we did some writing assignments in response to Frida Kahlo's painting The Two Fridas (1939). By coincidence, I found this video through Tumblr this morning:
FOUND by Carina Garcia from Van Maximilian Carlson on Vimeo.

Otra vez Frida

Judy Arginteau has a great piece in MinnPost about the Frida Kahlo show at the Walker and the Georgia O'Keeffe show at the MIA. I've seen the O'Keeffe show twice now, and I went to the opening night party for the Frida show. I even got to see her art, in spite of the crush of people.

Here are some more fragments of film with Frida and Diego:

A clip from the 1983 film Frida: naturaleza viva, which I still haven't seen:

and one of many photo-homenajes, this one with music by Lila Downs:

We *heart* Frida

Fridamania hits Minneapolis! I went to the opening night party on Friday. As someone put it, too many people! It was like waiting for space mountain. LOL. I lurked by the box office and spied on all the fabulous people in their fabulous clothes as they waited in a a super-long line that snaked around the lobby. Once inside, we waited in line for drinks, for food, and to get into the space where the show was mounted. But it was a fun, happy vibe, with great decorations, good food, and busy bartenders. The show itself is incredible. I have seen posters, photos, or digitized images of almost all the paintings in the show, and some of them in other shows, but to see them all together and to see how SMALL so many of them are changes one's whole relationship to the art. She was a good draughtswoman, with a complex use of color, and the recurring vegetal motif in so many of her painting are fascinating. I plan to return more than once. There are a lot of Frida related activities in town. KFAI's show Encuentros did two programs of music Frida would have listened to. You can stream the shows: in addition to the music, the commentary is very smart. Here's the playlist form the first show: popular dance music of the twenties. I sure do love my KFAI-Radio without Boundaries!

A film series has been programmed in conjunction with the show, called Cinemateca. The Highpoint Center for Printmaking has a show of Mexican contemporary printmakers that I don't want to miss.They are having a workshop on Saturday afternoon that I think my daughter would really enjoy.

Frida Kahlo show comes to the Walker Art Center in October

Frida's coming to the Walker! Here's the press release:

Frida Kahlo Centennial Exhibition to Premiere at Walker Art Center and Travel to Philadelphia and San Francisco

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), will present a major exhibition of the artist’s paintings spanning her career. Curated by art historian and world-renowned Kahlo biographer Hayden Herrera and Walker Associate Curator Elizabeth Carpenter, Frida Kahlo premieres at the Walker October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008, before traveling to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and SFMOMA.

Few artists have captured the public’s imagination with the force of Frida Kahlo. Making clear her powerful influence on artists working today, Frida Kahlo will include some 50 paintings from the very beginning of her career in 1926 to the year of her death in 1954. While concentrating on Kahlo’s hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits, it also will include those particular portraits and still lifes which amplify her own sense of identity. As Kahlo’s artistic practice progressed, her images grew in confidence and complexity, reflecting both her private obsessions and political concerns.

In addition to the paintings, the exhibition will feature iconic images of Frida Kahlo by preeminent photographers of the period from the Vicente Wolf Photography Collection as well as personal snapshots with family and friends from the artist’s own photo albums, some of which have never before been published or exhibited. The photographs pose fascinating questions about an artist who was both the consummate manufacturer of her own image and a beguiling and willing photographic subject.

A major publication with newly commissioned essays, bibliography, exhibition history, and illustrated timeline, will accompany the exhibition.

Exhibition Tour

Premiere
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 27, 2007–January 20, 2008

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Mid-February–Mid-May, 2008

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California
June 14–September 16, 2008

Because Frida Kahlo was born in 1907, 100 years ago, Frida fans world-wide are oganizing an amazing array of artistic events inspired by her life, her work, and her myths. The most up-to-date news about all things Frida can be found at the website Frida Kahlo and Contemporary Thought, as usual. It is a fan site, and posts a disclaimer about not being official, but I have found it endlessly useful and fascinating, and I thank the site owner Daniela Falini for her labor of love. The site functions with frames, so you can't link directly to the sub-categories, but here is a list: I encourage Frida fans to explore the links in the side bar:

• Frida news (archives going back to the year 2000)
• Frida paintings (including both online sites and museum sites)
• Frida cult (which is currently featuring news about the 2007 centennary shows world-wide)
• a brief biography
• some critical essays
• "the most complete bibliography on the Web"
• Frida and the contemporary arts (dance, theater, fashion, cinema) comics about Frida; exhibitions (permanent and temporary)
• "friends" which has a host of related links.

Cristina Rivera Garza

I don't recall how I discovered NO HAY TAL LUGAR, a blog by Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza--I think I was looking for someone else. I was immediately enchanted by her writing, especially when I discovered her collaboration with others on "la semana de la mujer invisible" (this reminded me of James Tiptree, Jr aka Alice Sheldon's classic story "The Women That Men Don't See").

Another collaborative project is "la semana inquietante (e internacional) de la mujer barbuda" which is documented at Un blog propio by Eve Gil.

CRG began blogging in 2003, in the beginning as part of a project for a novel, while teaching at UCSD, and continues now that she has returned to teach in Mexico. She has published poetry, essay and novels, for which she has won many awards, including the Premio Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz in 2001 for the novel The image on the cover of the Tusquets edition of her book is a painting by Frida Kahlo called The suicide of Dorothy Hale.

Today I read her contribution to a collective column, a collaboration of a group of writers called 'La primera dama' that appears in El Universal. Her latest contribution, La bolsa o la vida, is a prose poem and also very funny. I must find her novels and read them!

Emocionada.

ChasingMoksha over at Hah! tagged me with the picture meme. Thank you! I intend to repeat this exercise a few more times, because coming up with ONLY 8 images that amaze me, eight amazing images is like trying to answer the question "what's your favorite book?" No way to choose. But here are eight to start.


The girl is going to be twelve in one week. I'm purely amazed.



This is a picture from the summer of her grandparents in Portalrubio in Spain. The fact that we are in each other's lives at all is something for which I give thanks.



The Golden Gate Bridge was a fact of my childhood landscape. I miss seeing the Bay, the bridge, the fog. I miss walking on the beachers, over the hills, through Golden Gate Park. I need to go back soon.


I saw this enormous stone carving in Mexico City before I ever saw a picture of it. It made my hair stand on end. It still does.




This is an image I've had on a postcard since I was a child. I never paid attention to who the artist was or what the image was about. I just liked how the woman was so absorbed in her reading that she didn't seem to care that she was riding on the back of a giant carp. That was me, and it still is. To be able to share another person's world through words continues to amaze me.

Now I know that it is called Mitate no kinko and was painted in 1765 by Suzuki Haronobu, the artist who revolutionized printing techniques during the Ukiyo-e (Floating World) period in Japan.



This painting by Frida Kahlo is the first painted image I know of in which the viewer is positioned to see a woman's own body from that woman's point of view, without the use of a mirror.


In my dreams, I can dance like Judith Jamison. I saw her in "Cry" with the Alvin Ailey company before she stopped performing.

Isn't this amazing? I have seen an eclipse. I love being able to see these pictures of the universeCrown of the Sun.

I guess I'm supposed to tag someone, but I don't really know that many bloggers and i feel shy about tagging someone out of the blue. So I'll invite anyone who reads to think about doing their own image gathering, and if you do it, let me know, OK?

Tina Modotti

Well, I'm all excited that my mother will be visiting from SF, but now I've discovered that there is a fabulous show, Mexico as Muse: Tina Modotti and Edward Weston at the SFMOMA! Since I doubt I can sneak away before the show ends Jan 7, I will have to make do with this delightful interactive program, and look for this book in the library: Patricia Alber's Fire, Shadows,Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti. Albers uncovered a cache of letters and photographs which almost doubled the known number of photos by Tina Modotti. As with Frida Kahlo, for years Tina Modotti was primarily known for her beauty as a model for painters and photographers, for her love affairs, as a figure of scandal. The work of feminist art critics and scholars brought new attention to Modotti as an artist and photographer. The 1996 Tate Gallery show pairing Tina Modotti's work with that of Frida was a part of the revival of interest in the lives and art of both women, and in the Mexican artistic and intellectual world of the twenties and thirties.

Because Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera began their courtship at her parties, she appears in the film Frida in her "femme fatale" version, Ashley Judd dancing the tango with Salma Hayak. There are several biographies of Modotti, but she remains a controversial figure, and biographers are still having trouble seeing how the pieces of her life fit together.

The real Tina Modotti (1896-1942) was born in Udine, in the north of Italy. Her family was very poor, and Tina had to leave school to work in a factory when she was a child. Like so many Italians at the turn of the century, her family sought to survive through immigration, first to Austria and then to the US. Her father came over in 1906, and brought the family in stages later. This is more or less the story of both my great-grandfathers on my mother's side, who were stone masons working in Greenwich, Conn, and who brought my grandparents over when they were young children in 1905 and 1906. North Beach in San Francisco (my home town) was where Tina arrived in 1913 as a teenager. She worked in a shirt factory, and then as a seamstress but also joined the community of artists, acting in theater. My mother has a friend who has collected the oral histories of elderly Italians who lived in North Beach. I wonder where Tina lived in San Francisco?

Tina married an artist, and they went to Los Angeles where she acted in silent films, often having to supply her own costumes, typecast as the exotic femme fatale. She wanted to learn photography, and began taking lessons from Edward Weston. They became lovers. When her husband went to Mexico City, he wrote about the excitement and artistic ferment there. She was to join him, but he died before she arrived. Weston joined her there, and it was in Mexico- the "Mexican Renaissance"-- that she produced the body of her photographic work. Elena Poniatowska, author of a novelized version of Tina's life, writes about how Tina was scandalous to Mexicans, even among the scandalous Mexican artists and revolutionaries, because she lived with a man without marrying him, posed nude for artists, and went out with men to bars. When I first went to Mexico City, there were still signs prohibiting women from entering bars, and it was assumed that any women who did go in were there to do business of some kind.

Weston and Modotti were partners; in exchange for learning to be a photographer, she ran his studio, and eventually they were doing jobs together. Then she began getting her own jobs, and displaying her own work. Almost all of her pictures were taken while she lived in Mexico City. Albers was able to gain access to a set of photos and documents that were among the things kept by her husband's family; the number of her known photos has grown from around 250 to 400. This photo, of a puppeteer's hands, is on display in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. To look at more of her photos, check out this set of links on the OCAIW site.

After Weston's departure, she became involved with the Cuban JulioAntonio Mella, journalist, political organizer and communist party founder. One night as they were walking together, he was gunned down. Was he killed by Cuban dictator Machado's operatives, as is still claimed in Cuba today? Was he a victim of anti-Trotskyite purge? Was Stalinist agent Vittorio Vidali, whom Tina was later to marry, involved in his death? Tina herself was accused of Mella's murder, but the press attacked her as much for her sexual freedom as for her politics, publishing nude photographs taken by Weston, and she was forced to leave Mexico after a sensationalistic trial. In Europe, she stopped taking pictures, and worked as a spy/agent for the Soviet Union. She married Vidali, known to be a Soviet thug, and he apparently was abusive to her. This part of her life is subject to intense debate. She met La Pasionara in Moscow, and went to Spain during the Civil War she worked as a nurse with an ambulance crew. Forced to leave Spain after the defeat of the Republican cause, she returned to Mexico, where she died shortly after in circumstances that were surrounded, once again, by scandal and mystery. She was apparently quite ill, but others have claimed she was killed.

I've read many conflicting accounts. This article by Peter Byrne seems to me to synthesize quite well the the dilemma faced by the biographer of Tina Modotti: getting the history right while doing justice to the amazing drama of her life. He points to one of Diego Rivera's mural panels ,often called "In the Arsenal," as a symbol of this tension. That's Tina, in the corner, looking at Mella, while Vidali in the black hat looks at her.
Frida's in the middle, handing out ammunition.

Broken column

Professor Zero calls our attention to the uncovering of a monolith of the diety Tlaloc in Mexico City, very near the Museo del Templo Mayor, (explore the museum with this virtual tour). This is a major archaeological find, and part of the ongoing re-interpretation of Mexico.

Twenty-nine years ago, while excavating for a new metro station next to the Cathedral, a monolithic image was uncovered, a massive stone disc carved with a representation of the dismembered body of the Moon Goddess, Coyolxauhqui. It turned out to be part of the Great Temple (the Templo Mayor) long thought to be underneath the Cathedral itself.

The archaeolgoical dig, the image of a woman's broken body, bring to mind Frida Kahlo's painting The Broken Column. Another revelation in Mexico City: last year, a room that had remained closed for over fifty years was opened in the Casa Azul. Apparently, Dolores Olmedo had given orders that the door was to remain locked, and it did until her death in 2002, and until a new museum director asked what was behind it. It was a bathroom used to store a host of objects and most of Frida's clothing, now being restored. Someo of the other objects found inside include hundreds of photographs taken by Frida's father, a pair of earrings given to her by Picasso, her prosthetic leg, her pain medications, the various corsets she had to wear after her many operations.

The Blue House/La casa azul de Frida Kahlo

Amazingly enough, despite the fact that the Blue House has been a museum, tourist attraction, and destination for countless people over the years, it was only when it was being repaired that some rooms were opened and a treasure trove of objects were found: Frida's clothes, photographs by her father, objects that are familiar because they can be seen in paintings and photographs (earrings given to her by Picasso, for example). I plan to follow up on this story. Meanwhile, here is the Tate Modern's virtual tour of the Blue House.

Spanish-speaking readers can learn more about Frida from this wonderful illustrated chronology of her life by Susana Hermoso-Espinosa on Homines.com, a portal site with great articles on art and culture.
Artist Annie Gillingham has created a wonderful virtual Casa Azul, a site with reproductions of art by Frida Kahlo, but also art inspired by Frida's work and sections dedicated to other imporant women artists of Mexico, Remedios Varo and Leonor Cunningham.

La casa azul is the title of a theater piece, inspired by Frida's writings, written by Quebecoise Sophie Faucher and brought to the stage by reknowned theatrical creator Robert Lepage.


Here is a spectacular set of photos from the Flickr Frida and Diego pool. If you click on the photo during slide show, you can see information about the photographer and whatever caption or text has been provided about the image. There are some beautiful pictures of La casa azul itself, but also images of Trostky's house, the two connected houses built by Frida and Diego, and many photos of art and objects inspired by Frida and her work. I especially like the images of a bathroom in which a reproduction of What the Water Told Me is hung over the bathtub.

Latin American blogs

Now it is time to explore a few, just a very few, Latin American blogs.
Greg Weeks edits the academic journal The Latin Americanist, and his blog Two Weeks Notice is a good place to start for the political science perspective. A blog also called The Latin Americanist rounds up stories on business, politics and culture. La Profesora Abstraida writes about Mexico. The Latin American News Review gives a left perspective of LA politics. Ricardo Carreon is a Mexican living in Brazil who works for Intel; he gives a great overview of how the Mexican elections have motivated a host of new bloggers.

En castellano:EBRmx (El blog de Rodrigo) is described as a "citizen journalist" blog and has incredible photos, a huge blogroll of press sites, and a soundtrack! Chilangabanda is a metroblog about el D.F.--more commercial and cultural than political. NO HAY TAL LUGAR is a fabulous feminist creative "space" where Cristina Rivera Garza writes. Her co-conspirators include Amaranta Caballero, and they sometimes hang out together in their "ciberestudio" Un Blog Propio.

Mexico-in-English is a good place for folks who don't speak Spanish to connect with Mexico. Here is a clip of Lila Downs singing La cumbia del mole. And here's the biggest, most comprehensive Frida site.

Serendipity

How many times have I found something when I wasn't looking for it? I spent the day at the library hunting down books and articles about Frida Kahlo for a class. I found this snippet of film footage of Frida and Diego from the Tate Modern show last year. After all the paintings and photos of Frida immobile, it's a little uncanny to see her in motion.