I absolutely loved my time in Ciudad de Mexico, and, perhaps with the exception of snacking on fried chapulines (grasshoppers) and guacamole at Corazón de Maguey, nothing was more memorable than my visits to Casa Azul. Though I was certainly aware of the bullet points of the Frida Kahlo story, I’d never taken the time to get to know her life and work. The house and its garden—where Kahlo lived as a child and then returned as a prominent artist years later—are beautiful versions of the local architecture of its period in its finest form. But it’s the lovingly preserved furnishings and artwork, along with the costume display in an adjacent building, that convey the genius of her work, the power of her activism and the challenges of her struggle—as a woman married to a prominent, philandering artist, Diego Rivera, and as someone who contracted polio and who was hit by a bus in her teens and who dealt with disability her entire life. She not only rose above the occasion, but managed to live a full, colorful life and create timeless work in her brief forty-seven years.
I left a Frida fan.
BRIAN HIEGGELKE
Look for Newcity’s June 2021 print edition at over 300 Chicago-area locations this week or subscribe to the print edition at Newcityshop.com.
In this issue:
The Conversation: Claudia Flores makes the case for police reform A Living Institution: The South Side Community Art Center is a force in African American Art This Is Who I Am: A forty-year Frida Kahlo drought ends
Editor's Letter: June 2023 Chicago's former Main Post Office opened in 1921 with a design by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White that featured a magnificent Art Deco lobby and occupied twenty acres of space to serve what was then the world capital of mail-order commerce led by the Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward companies. Now it has been restored.
Editor's Letter: February 2021 Taking as our premise "Mirror to the Future," we tasked our writers with looking to the past to help us understand where we are today and where we might go from here.
Editor's Letter: November 2021 Newcity invited fourteen writers to share their "personal Best of Chicago”—a collection of voices expressing their city in their own very personal ways, that together offer universal insights into what we all cherish about our life in this place.
Editor's Letter: October 2021 We are so fortunate in Chicago to have front-row seats to an undertaking as ambitious as a biennial. One of the greatest attributes of a global forum like this is in the blending of voices and perspectives.
