aliology

Today, Matthew and I went into San Francisco with his grandparents, his cousin, Sophia, and a family friend. Our plan was to go to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit. When we went to buy our tickets, we found out that we couldn’t get into that exhibit until 4:00 p.m. In the meantime, we visited Yerba Buena Gardens where they were holding a festival of Latin music. We listened to a variety of musical styles ranging from a female Guatemalan singer to a Afro-Brazilian drumming troupe. The garden is a wide, vibrantly green field flecked with trees, bursting with people, and contained on all sides by high-rise buildings. In contrast to the fast-paced people rushing down the streets, the people here were at peace and enjoying the sights and sounds of San Francisco.

Eventually, we pulled ourselves away, had lunch, and returned to the museum. We paired off to explore the rest of the collections before meeting up at 4:00 p.m. Matthew and I set off upstairs and strolled through the exhibits. It turns out that he and I have very different styles of viewing art: Matthew rushes by many pieces until his attention is caught by something particularly special, then he stops abruptly and remains there to study it (at least until I catch up). I walk slowly, considering every piece and feverishly taking pictures of my favorites.

Right before we went to the Kahlo exhibit, Matthew and I caught the last bit of her documentary. The movie discussed her divorce and remarriage to Diego Rivera, another famous artist who shadowed Kahlo during her lifetime. He had a long affair with Kahlo’s younger sister Cristina but they remarried because of their desperate love and affection for each other. Former students of Kahlo’s reminisced about her lessons when she taught them how to discover the hues that form a color the way a chef tastes food to find its ingredients. The movie also revealed that Frida Kahlo was ill and in pain for most of her adult life after surviving polio and a bus accident followed by thirty subsequent surgeries. She ultimately died from complications due to those injuries.

It was much more interesting and enjoyable for me to view her exhibit after learning about her life because she painted her life, her emotions, her struggles, her joys, and her self. Her paintings were often shocking and a little morbid, but knowing something about the artist made them less so. An overwhelming majority of Frida Kahlo’s works are self-portraits, with a rivaling number of still lifes, which draw upon her Mexican heritage, educational background in medicine, emotional turmoil, physical agony, unwaivering joy, and love of life. Her commemorative website, fridakahlo.com, says, “From 1926 until her death, the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life.” Her paintings were always full to the brim with color and imagery… in several instances, her painting couldn’t even be contained by the frame.

“I paint self portraits because I am the person I know best.”         
-Frida Kahlo

I cooked dinner with Oma tonight. We made a really good curry recipe of hers — lots of curry and turmeric, a little cayenne pepper and conversation… delicious!