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Another side of a legend

Bi painter Kahlo’s photos displayed in new exhibit

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‘Frida Kahlo: Her Photos’
Artisphere
1101 Wilson Blvd.
Arlington, VA
Feb. 23-March 25

(Images courtesy Frida Kahlo Museum via Artisphere)

 

Fans of Frida Kahlo and students of photography in the D.C. area have a rare opportunity to see a collection of photographs that document and explore the fascinating life and rich legacy of this influential queer artist.

From Feb. 23 through March 25, Artisphere will be the only venue in the United States to show “Frida Kahlo: Her Photos,” an exhibition of personal photographs that have been hidden from public view since Kahlo’s death in 1954.

The extraordinary work of bisexual Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is celebrated by a diverse group of dedicated fans. Best known for a series of stunning self-portraits that use costume and color to great effect, Kahlo is now seen as an important member of the surrealist movement. Artist André Breton hailed her work as a “ribbon around a bomb” and it’s admired in Mexico as an exploration of national and indigenous traditions. Feminists celebrate her painting as an uncompromising depiction of female bodies and lives and a powerful testament to her incredible strength in facing a life of chronic pain.

Writing in the online encyclopedia glbtq, queer cultural critic Tamsin Wilton also underscores the importance of Kahlo as a queer artist. During her long tempestuous marriage to famous activist and artist Diego Rivera, Kahlo had several affairs with both men and women. More artistically significant, however, is her bold use of costume to challenge traditional notions of female sexuality. Just as her depictions of ornate Mexican costumes were used to celebrate indigenous Amerindian culture, Wilton writes that Kahlo was often pictured in male attire to “make a statement about her own independence from feminine norms. She was a masterly and magical exponent of cross-dressing, deliberately using male ‘drag’ to project power and independence.”

During her life, Kahlo created and collected more than 2,500 photographs from her international travels and from visitors to the house that she and Rivera shared. After Rivera’s death, in accordance with his will, this collection of snapshots was sealed and put in storage. In 2007, on the 50th anniversary of Rivera’s death, the collection was opened and cataloged by Mexican photographer and curator Pablo Ortiz Monasterio.

Monasterio has assembled 259 of these photographs into “Frida Kahlo: Her Photos,” which opens next week in Arlington. He has arranged the photographs into six thematic areas that align with the periods in Kahlo’s life. Each area was displayed in a separate room of the Blue House, a display that is recreated at Artisphere.

The first room, called Origins, documents the profound influence that Kahlo’s family had on her work. Her father Guillermo Kahlo, a German émigré, was a portrait photographer. He taught Frida the art of photography and trained her in the darkroom. Her mother, Matilde Calderón y Gonzalez, was a Roman Catholic with mixed Spanish and Amerindian heritage. The second room, The Blue House, explores Casa Azul, the Kahlo family home in Coyoacán Mexico, a sister city of Arlington, Va., where Frida was born, lived most of her life and died.

The third room, The Broken Body, displays photographs examining a central theme in Kahlo’s life and work, her serious physical injuries and her struggles with intense chronic pain. Kahlo contracted polio at age 6. As a result, her right leg was significantly thinner than her left. She often disguised this by wearing long skirts. In 1925, while she was a student in medical school, Kahlo was in a serious bus accident that left her with significant injuries, including multiple broken bones and internal injuries. These injuries made it impossible for her to bear children, a fact that haunted her for life. Over the course of 29 years, Kahlo endured 35 operations and suffered three miscarriages. She was frequently in intense pain and had to be bedridden or confined to a hospital for long periods.

Kahlo began her career as an artist when she was in a body cast after her accident. Her mother designed a special easel for her and her father lent her paint and brushes. In addition to themes of national and sexual identity, her work often drew on images of bodily pain and expressed feelings of pain.

The fourth room of the exhibition is called Love and includes images of Kahlo’s family and friends, including her husband Diego and two of her male lovers. (The exhibition does not include any pictures of her known female lovers.) Cynthia Connelly, Artisphere’s Visual Arts Curator, is amazed by the incredible relationships Kahlo developed during her life.

“When you walk through this room — and the entire exhibition — you get a sense of a really strong woman who surrounded herself with creative and challenging people,” Connelly says. “She lived a wonderful life and opened herself up to all kinds of ideas and experiences. She and Diego lived through so much history, but they were also creating history.”

The fifth room, Photography, looks at the connection between Kahlo’s painting and her snapshot collection. Curator Ortiz traces several images, including a black cat and a dead baby, from Kahlo’s canvases back to their photographic origins. The sixth room, Diego’s Eyes, presents a series of photographs that directly and indirectly influenced Rivera’s huge political murals.

Connolly says those visiting the exhibition should be sure to read the photos’ descriptions, which contain a bounty of back story.

Each of the pictures is displayed with detailed information on the subject and artist (where they are known), date and media. In addition, Kahlo has left handwritten notes on the back of many of the snapshots, and in one case even left a lipstick print over an image of her husband Diego. Connolly also points out that the exhibit is a little like a mystery. “Each of the photographs fills in a little bit of her story,” she says, “but many of them bring up further questions and we can’t answer all of them for you. Pay attention to the details.”

These pictures also document an important moment in art history — the emergence of photography as a public art form. “In a time where almost everyone has a camera phone, we take photographs for granted,” Connolly says. “This was a time when photography was just coming into mass consumption. Snapshots were becoming less formal. Think about the kind of cameras being used and who processed the film.”

Given her skills in the darkroom, Kahlo may have developed many of them herself, though the photos shown at Artisphere are copies. Under the terms of Rivera’s will, the artifacts from Casa Azul are not allowed to leave Mexico. The local exhibition has been arranged in the same layout used by Monasterio in the original exhibition.

In addition to the historic photographs, the celebration of Frida Kahlo at Artisphere includes a variety of related events. There are two film series, one on women filmmakers (including Julie Taymor’s biopic “Frida” with Selma Hayek as the famous artist) and one featuring Robert Rodriguez; performances by flamenco artists, female salsa artists and the Mexican Institute of Sound; and hands-on workshops on surrealism.

Artisphere has produced this exhibition in collaboration with the Frida Kahlo Museum (Coyoacán, Mexico), Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli (Coyoacán, Mexico), the Embassy of Mexico, the Mexican Cultural Institute and Arlington County, with additional support from the Rosslyn Business Improvement District. This international collaboration was initially facilitated by the Arlington Sister City Association.

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Movies

A cat and its comrades ride to adventure in breathtaking ‘Flow’

Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis directs animated fantasy adventure

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(Image courtesy of Janus Films)

Sometimes, life changes overnight, and there’s nothing to do but be swept away by it, trying to navigate its currents with nothing to help you but sheer instinct and the will to survive.

Sound familiar? It should; most lives are at some point met with the challenge of facing a new personal reality when the old one unexpectedly ceases to exist. Losing a job, a home, a relationship: any of these experiences require us to adapt, often on the fly; well-laid plans fall by the wayside and the only thing that matters is surviving to meet a new challenge tomorrow.

When such catastrophes are communal, national, or even global, the stability of existence can be erased so completely that adaptation feels nearly impossible; the “hits” just keep on coming, and we’re left reeling in a constant state of panicked uncertainty. That might sound familiar, too.

If so, you likely realize that there’s little comfort to be found in most of the entertainments we seek for distraction, outside of the temporary respite provided by thinking about something else for a while — but there are some entertainments that can work on us in a deeper way, too, and perhaps provide us with something that feels like hope, even when we know there is no chance of returning to the world we once knew.

“Flow” is just such an entertainment.

Directed by Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis from a screenplay co-written with Matīss Kaža, this independently-produced, five-and-a-half-year-in-the-making animated fantasy adventure has become one of the most acclaimed films of 2024; debuting at Cannes in the non-competitive “Un Certain Regard” section, it won raves from international reviewers and went on to claim yearly “best of” honors from numerous critics’ organizations and film award bodies, including the Golden Globes and the National Board of Review. Now nominated not only for the Academy’s Best Animated Feature award but as Best International Feature (only the third animated movie to accomplish that feat) as well, it stands as the odds-on favorite to take home at least one of those Oscars, and possibly even both — and once seen, it’s hard to dissent from that assessment.

Set in an unspecified time and an unknown, richly forested place, it centers its narrative — which begins with breathtaking quickness, almost from the opening frames of the film — on a small-ish charcoal grey cat, who wakes from its slumber to find its home rapidly disappearing under a rising tide of water. Trying to stay ahead of the flood, it finds a lifeline when it discovers an abandoned sailboat, adrift on the waves, and seeks safety on board; but the cat is not the only refugee here, and with an unlikely group of other animals — a dog, a capybara, a lemur, and a secretary bird — sharing the ride, the plucky feline must forge alliances with (and between) each of its shipmates if any of them are to avoid a seemingly apocalyptic fate. Faced with setbacks and challenges at every turn, the crew of unlikely comrades learns to cooperate out of shared necessity — but will it be enough to keep the uncontrollable waters that surround them from becoming their final oblivion?

With no human presence in the movie — though the implication that it once existed, accompanied by the inevitable suspicion that climate change is behind the mysterious flood, is ominously delivered through the monumental ruined structures and broken relics it has seemingly left behind — the story unfolds without a word of dialogue, a narrative chain of events that keeps us ever-focused on the “now.” The non-verbal vocalizations of its characters (each provided by authentic animal sounds rather than human impersonation) help to convey their relationships with clarity, but it’s the visual evocation of their sensory experiences — of being trapped and at the mercy of the elements, of making an unexpected connection with another being, of enjoying a simple pleasure like a soft place to sleep — that fuels this remarkable exploration of physical existence at its most raw and vulnerable. We have no way of knowing what has happened, no way of imagining what is yet to come, but such questions fade quickly into irrelevance as the story carries our attention from the immediacy of one moment into the next.

Accentuating this in-the-moment flow of “Flow”— for if ever a film title could be said to summarize its style, it is surely this one — is its eye-absorbing visual beauty, rendered via the open-sourced software Blender to provide an aesthetic which matches the material. These realistically-drawn animals come vividly to life against a backdrop that captures a deep connection to nature, accented with the surreal intrusions of human influence and a certain appreciation for the colorful beauty of the world around us, even at its most untamed, which hints at an indefinable mysticism; and when the story begins to transcend the expected borders of its meticulously-crafted realism, the animation takes us there so easily that we scarcely notice it has happened.

Yet transcend it does, and in so doing becomes something greater than a humble adventure tale. As the animal companions progress in their journey toward hoped-for safety, the remnants of human existence become more weathered, more ancient, and less recognizable; the natural landscape through which they are carried begins to be transformed, rendered in a more mythic light by the clash of elemental forces swirling around them and the strange encounters with other creatures that occur along their way. Whatever world this may have been, it seems rapidly to be dissolving into a cosmos where the forms of the past are being reconfigured into something new — and the band of travelers, both witness to and participants in this process, cannot help but be reconfigured, too.

We can’t explain that further without spoilers, but we can tell you that it includes the cat’s ability to ignore its solitary instincts and natural mistrust of its comrades in order to form a diverse (yes, we said it) and cooperative team. It also involves learning to let go of things that can no longer help, to be open to new possibilities that might, and perhaps most importantly, to surrender without fear to the “flow” and trust that it will eventually take you where you need to go, as long as you can manage to stay afloat until you get there.

Zilbalodis’s film is an immersive ride, full of visceral and frequently harrowing moments that may produce some anxiety (especially for those who hate seeing animals in peril) and conceptual shifts that may challenge your expectations — but it is a ride well worth taking. More than merely a fantastical “Noah’s Ark” fable reimagined for an environmentally conscious age, it just might offer the timely catharsis many of us need to confront our unknowable future with a renewed sense of possibility.
“Flow” begins streaming on Max on Feb. 14.

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Out & About

Celebrate Aquarius season with drag

SADBrunch holds event at Throw Social

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Cake Pop! hosts the brunch at Throw Social on Sunday. (Washington Blade file photo by Michael Key)

SADBrunch will host “Drag Brunch” on Sunday, Feb. 16 at 12 p.m. at Throw Social.

Grab your friends & family, your mimosa, a plate full of food, and join us for Drag Brunch. Five flocking fabulous queens take to the stage to perform in this sassy, extravagant, fantabulous event. Tickets start at $25 and are available on Eventbrite

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Out & About

Being single doesn’t mean you have to be alone this Valentine’s Day!

Casa De LGBT hosts speed dating event

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(Image by kotoffei/Bigstock)

Casa De LGBT will host “Gay, DL, Transgender Speed Dating” on Friday, Feb. 14 at 8:00p.m. at 1406 N. Capitol St. NW. 

This will be a night of speed dating, deep connections, and good vibes! Whether you’re gay, lesbian, transgender, or queer, this event is designed to bring people together in a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment Come ready to connect, have fun, and maybe even meet someone special. Tickets cost $30 and can be purchased on Eventbrite.

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