How Kahlo collected, celebrated and depicted Mexican folk arts in both her painting and her persona
The visionary and supremely self-fashioning artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54) drew inspiration throughout her career from arte popular-painted ceramics, embroidered textiles, religious votives, effigies and children''s toys, and other objects created in Mexico-s rural and Indigenous communities. The hundreds of folk-art objects that filled her home and studio attest to her nationalist politics and her fascination with the work of carvers, weavers, sculptors of papier-m--nd vernacular painters. She depicted these objects in her paintings and adopted elements of traditional dress and ornament in her own self-presentation, playing on modernist fascination with folk culture and on her own relation to layered Mexican identity.
This bilingual book, the first in-depth exploration of Kahlo-s varied and sophisticated responses to arte popular, situates her within the broad
