Adriana Zavala Photo: Brad Dececco

Kahlo’s Fertile Ground

On a warm Saturday afternoon in mid-May, Adriana Zavala took in the scene at the New York Botanical Garden, indoors and out: a profusion of creamy calla lilies, prickly cacti, and red bougainvillea, a trio of young Mexicans playing violins and guitar, and visitors strolling and enjoying the art of Frida Kahlo (1907–1954). Several women channeled the Mexican painter herself, their hair piled high, flowers tucked behind their ears.

Zavala, a Tufts associate professor of art history, understands the allure of Kahlo’s story—the debilitating bus accident, the tumultuous marriage to the muralist Diego Rivera, even the famous unibrow. But she hopes the exhibition she has curated at the Botanical Garden will help people appreciate Kahlo for her work. Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life contains fourteen art pieces, as well as an imaginative re-creation of Kahlo’s courtyard garden at her home in Mexico City, enhanced by Mexican music and food.

Botanical themes predominate, as in the 1931 painting that depicts the botanist Luther Burbank as half man, half tree. The man/plant portrait, Zavala says, reflects Kahlo’s fascination with hybrids. The painter was herself the product of a German father and a Mexican mother, at a time when racial blending was viewed as degenerative.

Curating the exhibition brought its share of surprises. Zavala had never noticed the sketch of a cotyledon (an embryonic leaf in a seed) in the margin of a drawing called The Dream until researchers at the Botanical Garden pointed it out. And it wasn’t until she viewed the classic painting Sun and Life in person that she realized it was both a portrait of Diego Rivera and a self-portrait. Sun and Life, she says, “looks like it was painted yesterday—the colors are brilliant, and the surface qualities are clear. When you see a reproduction, you don’t pick up on that.”

Though she’s confident that Kahlo’s art will endure on its own, Zavala thinks people will always be attracted to the artist’s mystique. “Whatever draws them in is fine,” she says. “And then we can teach them something.”

The exhibition runs through November 1.

MARJORIE HOWARD is a senior writer at Tufts.