Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up

Claire Wilcox and Circe Henestrosa’s Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up presents a unique window into the artist’s life.

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), as an artist and a woman, has a unique international appeal. Her instantly recognizable work draws extensively on her life and her extraordinarily personal reflections upon it.

On Kahlo’s death, her husband, Diego Rivera (1886–1957), ordered that her most private possessions be locked away until 15 years after his death. The bathroom in which her belongings were stored in fact remained unopened until 2004. Through this incredible archive, Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up focuses on the personal, combining her prosthetics, jewelry, and clothes with self-portraits, diary entries, and letters to build an intimate portrait of the artist through her possessions, setting this in the context of her political and social beliefs.

Claire Wilcox is senior curator in the department of furniture, textiles, and fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum and professor in fashion curation at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. Circe Henestrosa is an independent curator and head of the School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.