Dear Friends
I have returned to Australia after a three-week visit to Mexico City, Atlanta and Los Angeles. I was especially pleased to return to Mexico – the birthplace in 1907 of my favourite artist, Frida Kahlo, whose home and museum I visited when at the International Federation of University Women’s biennial conference seven years ago. In addition to being an amazing artist, she has become a feminist icon, particularly for women of colour, LGBTIQ people and women with disabilities. Kahlo had originally hoped to be a doctor, but polio as a child and a traffic accident as a teenager left her with on-going physical injuries and unable to follow her original dream. While recovering, she picked up art, an old hobby from her childhood, and turned her canvases into commentary on gender, race, class, and identity. This painting, The Two Fridas was completed shortly after Kahlo’s divorce with Diego Rivera depicting her two different personalities and her desperation and loneliness after the separation. One is the traditional Frida in Tehuana costume with a broken heart, sitting next to an independent, modern dressed Frida. Later Kahlo and Rivera married again.
This is again a long newsletter but I hope you will skim through the headings that follow in case there is a subject of particular interest to you at this time….
Continue reading “Newsletter – Sydney June 2017”