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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Frida Kahlo photo exhibit brings rare personal images to Hagerstown
The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts is set to host a major exhibition featuring personal photographs of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. The exhibition, titled "Frida Kahlo: Picturing an Icon," will run from June 14 to Oct. 5, according to a community announcement. It will showcase 115 images from a collection of 450 photographs and objects acquired in 2003 by Vicente Wolf, a Cuban-born interior designer based in New York City. Wolf is believed to own the largest known collection of personal and family photographs of Kahlo in private hands. "My intention was to focus on the most iconic and emotionally resonant images — those that best capture Frida's presence, her aura and the complexity of her personal life," Wolf said in the announcement. "I was especially drawn to those that offered an intimate glimpse into her world, particularly those taken by Diego (her husband, Mexican artist Diego Rivera), which feel charged with both affection and insight. My goal was to create a portrait of Frida that goes beyond the myth — to reveal the woman, the artist and the vulnerability behind the legend." The museum has created a specially designed space for the exhibition, using a color palette taken from a photograph of Kahlo for Vogue Magazine, according to Executive Director Sarah J. Hall. All interpretive materials for the exhibition will be presented in both Spanish and English, and the museum has planned complementary activities, including Latin classical music performances, diary-making workshops and summer camps. "We want our visitors to be inspired by Frida's spirit by tapping into lived experience to make art," Hall said in the announcement. Wolf said that he hopes visitors will gain a deeper understanding of Kahlo through the exhibition. "It's one thing to see her art; it's another to see the life that fueled it," he said in the announcement. The exhibition is organized by Vicente Wolf Associates from Wolf's collection. Major funding has been provided by Nora and Bruce Wilder and the Visit Hagerstown & Washington County Convention & Visitors Bureau. The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and is closed on Mondays and major holidays. Admission and parking are free. For more information, go to or call 301-739-5727. This story was created by Janis Reeser, jreeser@ with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at or share your thoughts at with our News Automation and AI team. The Herald-Mail is growing its local news: Send your news to us This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Frida Kahlo exhibition coming to Hagerstown museum
Economist
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Economist
Why Latin American Surrealism is surging in a down art market
In 1956 the painter Diego Rivera stated that three of the world's most important female artists lived in Mexico. (His wife, Frida Kahlo, had just died.) He was talking about European émigrée Surrealists: Remedios Varo of Spain, Leonora Carrington of England and Alice Rahon of France.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
A Young Rockefeller Vanished in 1961. The Met's New Wing Celebrates His Memory
It's been said that Nelson Rockefeller, who as a grown-up managed the opening of Rockefeller Center, the real estate colossus in Midtown Manhattan, liked to play with blocks as a boy: the ones between 49th and 55th Streets. In fact, according to his most recent biographer, Richard Norton Smith, Nelson was 'less concerned with Rockefeller Center's commercial prospects than its artistic possibilities' (notwithstanding his eradication of a Diego Rivera mural there in 1934 after the artist defiantly superimposed a profile of Lenin). Rockefeller, who was elected governor of New York four times and was Gerald R. Ford's vice president, was infatuated with sui generis objects of art. He defined their value not by their provenance or price or the artist's cachet, but simply by what he liked. Inspired by Brasília, he created a new Capitol complex in Albany. He commissioned Picasso to produce tapestries, including one that hung in the boathouse of his vacation home in Seal Harbor, Maine, which he proudly showed off for visiting reporters after he was nominated to the vice presidency. His first childhood love, he once said, was a marbled Bodhisattva — a figure of a Buddha — from the Tang Dynasty. (At his request, his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, left it to him in her will.) On his eighth birthday, he asked for Raphael's Sistine Madonna, one of the few objects on his wish list that proved to be inaccessible; the 16th-century painting remains in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden. What his mother did for her trove of underappreciated American folk art by establishing a museum in Williamsburg, Va., as well as helping to found the Museum of Modern Art, Nelson Rockefeller did for Indigenous paintings and sculpture. He triggered a cultural revolution that elevated so-called primitive art from objects relegated to discreet ethnographic collections to their proper place as an integral component of global human creativity. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing originally opened in 1982, celebrating the arts and culture of Africa, the Pacific islands and the Americas. In 2013, introducing a yearlong celebration of Nelson's artistic and cultural vision, the Met's director, Thomas Campbell, acknowledged, belatedly, that the museum had embraced 'a seismic shift' that 'changed the direction of the museum radically.' 'For the very first time,' Campbell said, 'the Met became truly global.' Smith, who wrote 'On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller' (2014), said in an interview, 'I think he did as much to promote awareness of so-called primitive art as his mother did to make folk art respectable.' On Saturday, after over four years of repurposing and reconfiguring, the $70 million renovation of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum will reopen, supported by contributions from 'the Rockefeller family and their affiliated philanthropies,' as the Met explains it. The incandescent exhibition space and its contents prodigiously proclaim the fulfillment of a legacy that was inspired by Nelson's mother. It was catalyzed by his first purchase of a carved wooden bowl in Hawaii on his honeymoon when he was 22 — the same age as Nelson's son Michael when he traveled to what was then Dutch New Guinea for the first time in 1961 with a documentary film crew. As much as the collection celebrates the incomplete career of Michael, a novice anthropologist who was lost on his second expedition to New Guinea later that year, it also salutes the steely determination of his fraternal twin sister, Mary Rockefeller Morgan, a psychotherapist who is the daughter of Nelson and his first wife, Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, to preserve and display her family's patrimony. 'I'm a watchdog for the family. and the world,' Morgan, who is a spry 87, said in an interview. 'Like Father and Michael before me, I have developed an emotional connection to Indigenous art,' she explained. 'I love that this art so directly speaks to humanity's most basic needs and desire for safety, power, order, beauty and meaning.' A favorite example of 'the art's sophisticated patterns and echoing designs that often have symbolic meaning,' she said, is a 2,000-year-old wooden sculpture of a Mayan priest from Peru. 'He kneels, hands clasped to his breast; his head is back, and his mouth is open,' she added. 'To me, his face is filled with reverence and sheer awe of his gods. Whenever I see this ancient priest, I respond in stillness and with emotion. I am touched by Indigenous art's honesty and receive it as intimacy.' The 40,000-square-foot remodeled wing at the Met occupies the same footprint as the original, but feels more commodious and blazes with natural light. Its 1,726 artifacts represent about a quarter of the museum's trove of Indigenous art, about a third of which was collected by Michael and Nelson Rockefeller. But is the Met going against the grain by celebrating art from the Global South when 'inclusion' has become a dirty word? 'We think of this as great art from three-quarters of the world,' said Alisa LaGamma, curator in charge of the Rockefeller Wing and a specialist in African art (Joanne Pillsbury and Maia Nuku have curated the Ancient Americas and Oceania collections, respectively). 'We didn't think of this as a diversity project.' Provenance has been established. 'We are not a colonial collecting institution,' LaGamma said. (The museum said that Michael typically traded tools and tobacco pouches for the artifacts he collected, which, since most were ceremonial, would otherwise have deteriorated or been destroyed.) Smith, the biographer, suggested that the former governor's attraction to primitive art might have been rooted in his dyslexia, a learning disorder that affects the ability to read, write and spell, which Michael and Mary inherited. 'With dyslexia comes a real visual sense of how objects are placed,' Mary said. Michael's favorite painting was a whimsical collage by Georges Braque, she said, and recalled that her father once walked into Brooke Astor's living room and, without missing a beat, began rearranging the furniture. 'I think Nelson saw parallels between Indigenous art and the abstract forms he was forever having to explain to the uninitiated,' Smith said. 'Dyslexia may have been a factor in his enjoyment of both, but I think a greater influence was his globe-trotting for business as well as pleasure. Certainly his feelings for Latin America found expression in his collecting. Likewise, he showed interest in Africa in the 1950s, when most Americans were content to neglect the continent.' Nelson once put it this way: 'The more intellectual you get about art the less aesthetic you become.' In 1954, Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Indigenous Art in a townhouse on West 54th Street between his boyhood home and the Museum of Modern Art. (He changed the name to the Museum of Primitive Art only after too many people associated the name with 'indigent' or 'indigestion.') Nelson recruited Rene d'Harnoncourt (who later became the president of MoMA) and Robert Goldwater to curate the art bought from New York dealers or acquired on his forays abroad — beginning with the Hawaiian bowl and including a feathered Peruvian textile, a Yam Mask by the Abelam people of New Guinea and a whale carved in ivory from Tonga — as coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs in the early 1940s, which sought to strengthen U.S. influence in the region, and on his private philanthropic ventures. Michael Rockefeller first traveled to southwest New Guinea as the technician recording sound for a documentary film by the Peabody Museum's Harvard Film Study Center about the Asmat people who inhabited the uncharted jungles and rainforests of what they called 'the land of lapping death.' 'Michael had never been happier than in the nine months he spent in New Guinea,' Nelson recalled. But Mary wrote, in her wrenching memoir of losing a twin, 'When Grief Calls Forth the Healing' (2014) that she had a premonition that the 1961 expedition would be perilous and that her brother would not survive. 'I was dead set against your decision to go to such a dangerous and remote place,' she wrote in a post-mortem paean. 'Father championed the whole idea, so there was no way I could change your mind.' She wondered, though, why Michael hadn't rebelled when Nelson, a larger-than-life figure at home and in public, vetoed his intention to major in architecture at Harvard. 'God, I'm still getting out from under Father,' she wrote. 'Is that part of what you were doing by going to New Guinea? An unspoken agenda — but with his blessing? I have to admit, it was perfect for you, perfect for finding out about yourself without the family and for exploring your love of art.' Michael's love of art brought him and Nelson 'together in a special bond,' she wrote. After coming home to the United States briefly in a vain attempt to dissuade his parents from divorcing, Michael returned to Dutch New Guinea to collect and meticulously catalog artifacts, including nine 20-foot-high Asmat ceremonial poles to honor their ancestors, a 49-foot-long longboat canoe and fertility figures, ancestors, gods and spirits carved from mangrove trees. Michael had warned, though, that, 'many of the villages have reached that point where they are beginning to doubt the worth of their own culture and crave things Western.' He wrote his uncle John: 'There is a beauty in the simplicity and something compulsive about the way the Ndavi people have a grip on life' and recommended that Americans would benefit from the experience. When his catamaran capsized 10 miles from the coast, near the mouth of the Eilanden River, he decided to swim to land. He disappeared, either drowned (the official explanation) or killed by the Asmat, who had been known to practice head-shrinking and cannibalism. A partner on the expedition, a Dutch anthropologist who couldn't swim, was rescued from the boat 22 hours after Michael had dived in. 'I see now that you made your final choice, steeped in the Asmat environment where you'd found life and death exposed and intertwined with everyday reality,' Mary wrote. She accompanied her father to New Guinea to search for Michael, but his body was never found. Three years later he was declared legally dead. In 1974, after President Gerald R. Ford tapped Nelson as vice president, Mary became the last president of the Museum of Primitive Art. She also joined the board of the Met where she headed a joint committee that oversaw the transfer of the Rockefellers' collection — including some 400 objects that Michael had collected and were shipped to Westchester and stored in the old milking barn at the family's estate in Pocantico — to a new wing dedicated in his memory. Prolonged negotiations between d'Harnoncourt and Thomas Hoving, the Met's director, to transfer the collection to the museum had begun in the mid-1960s. In 1969, Nelson donated 1,400 artifacts, worth more than $20 million. He left the museum some 1,400 others valued at $5 million when he died in 1979. The wing finally opened in 1982. After Mary's fund-raising efforts and her insistence, supported by the museum's own conservators, the vast glass curtain wall facing south has been screened to protect vulnerable objects from the sun. 'Father wanted that collection in the Met and the collection being there is the stamp of approval,' she said. 'That wing being what it is today really impressed the world of the greatness of these art traditions.' The 1982 version of the wing cost $8.8 million to build and $9.5 million more to install the exhibits. Financing was supplied partly by members of the Rockefeller family, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Vincent Astor Foundation and other donors. The original catalog explained that describing the art as primitive was misleading. 'The art is not crude or rough, nor were the social or intellectual structures of the people who made it,' the catalog said. 'What then is primitive art? Properly it is the art of those peoples who have remained until recent times at an early technological level, who have been oriented toward the use of tools but not machines.' The new wing, Mary Morgan said, finally represents closure to a devastating episode for the Rockefeller family. 'Michael and I were lost,' (he literally, she figuratively) Mary wrote, but 'the thing that enabled us to accept Michael's death was that life really continues in this gift that he brought back from New Guinea. 'I feel like the reopening of the wing is the fulfillment of father's dream,' Mary said. 'And Michael's dream.' Nelson never got to be president. Nor did Michael fulfill his dream of becoming a professional anthropologist. But if any proof were needed of their commitment to art for art's sake it can be found in an alcove on the first floor of Kykuit, the Beaux-Arts mansion in Pocantico Hills that was home to four generations of Rockefellers and is now open to the public. A 30-inch-tall sculpture that Michael made in high school, of galvanized iron wires protruding from a stone base, is prominently displayed there — along with works by Gilbert Stuart, Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell and Picasso. But it wasn't merely parental pride. Mary Morgan recalls that when she was in the third grade, she crafted a wooden wastebasket. Nelson kept it in his dressing room on Fifth Avenue, and never showed it publicly. 'Father would not have put that there,' his twin said of Michael's sculpture, 'if he didn't like it.'
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Five Favorite Works of Art in Mexico City
Whenever I'm rattling through the many museums of Chapultepec Park, or jogging past the modernist towers along the boulevards of Reforma, I'm struck again by how many different eras Mexico City allows you to visit in one day. The city is the largest metropolis in North America, and has been stratified with seven centuries of cultural history: Indigenous sculpture, colonial monuments, modernist marvels and, most recently, some of the world's best contemporary art and architecture. The art and architecture of Mexico City can take your breath away, and not only because you are 7,350 feet above sea level; let me point you to five sites, some landmark-famous and some fairly obscure, that begin to map this city's inexhaustible cultural prosperity. Find these five and discover more art on our Google map of Mexico City. 1. The Museo Anahuacalli's sublime new expansion Most of the city's major museums are in the historic downtown core or the huge Chapultepec Park, but Mexico City's artists and intellectuals of the 20th century gravitated to the southern extremes of the capital. Down here in Coyoacán, in the years after World War II, the muralist Diego Rivera devoted himself to the construction of a pseudo-Indigenous fortress: an 'odd sort of ranch,' as he called it, that would house his large collection of Olmec, Nahua and Toltec masks and effigies. The Museo Anahaucalli, a concrete bunker covered in volcanic stone, rises like a black tomb from a bare central plaza. Inside, the labels are minimal, the shadows theatrical. Mosaics by the great Juan O'Gorman intermingle Mesoamerican and Communist motifs. Other museums here, above all the large Museum of Anthropology, can give you a proper grounding in pre-Hispanic cultural history. Anahuacalli … is not that. Demented excess, modern reverie: Anahuacalli is an imaginary Aztec Renaissance pastiche, all light and shadow, sublime and ridiculous in equal measure. My own passion for Anahuacalli developed on a visit after the opening in 2021 of an extension by Mauricio Rocha — one of the greatest architects working in Mexico or indeed anywhere in the Americas. Rocha's additions take the form of three low-slung pavilions of local basalt, nestled into the volcanic landscape: horizontal and harmonious where Rivera's original gives vertical dread. Rocha's warehouse, where more than 60,000 objects from the collection are now on view in visible storage, is the city's most beautiful museum space. 2. A white (and black) whale in a stupefying library With its roughly 600,000 books defying gravity on staggered and suspended shelves of steel, the Biblioteca Vasconcelos is one of the most dumbfounding, even intimidating buildings in town. The city's 21st-century library, by the architect Alberto Kalach, is a building where writing turns into infrastructure. In Mexico City they sometimes call it the 'Megabiblioteca,' and, looking up, you can feel like you've entered an Enlightenment vision of an infinite hall of knowledge. But I don't come here to read. Hanging in the center of this giant hall of books is one of my favorite works of public art: 'Mátrix Móvil' (2006), a sculpture by Gabriel Orozco, Mexico's most important living artist. It takes the form of a whale skeleton — not a cast of a skeleton, but the bones themselves, excavated from sand dunes in Baja California — which the artist overlaid with concentric arcs of finely drawn pencil. Remembrance rites in southern Mexico have long included the bleaching and displaying of the bones of the dead, and in earlier works Orozco had used skulls as unusual grounds for three-dimensional black-and-white abstract drawings. With the whale he took that project to an entirely new scale: a megastructure inside an architectural megastructure, given its own act of memorial display. The whale swims through the air, through history, through literature; it marries zoology to topology; it is a reconciliation of dreaming with life. 3. Isamu Noguchi's youthful antifascist frieze An art for the people! From the early 1920s, the government in post-revolutionary Mexico gave the country's painters a paramount task: inspire the nation with grand visions of historical achievement and nationalist pride. Embody, for what was then still a majority illiterate population, the nationalist dream of cultural hybridity known as 'mestizaje.' Paint over the colonial walls with the colors of a modern Mexico. Mexican Muralism has been drawing Americans since its first years — Jackson Pollock channeled the murals' churning forms into his allover drips — and crowds of foreigners still assemble in front of the frescoes of Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Siqueiros (my favorite muralist). But away from the tourist track, in a blue-collar market selling fresh fruit, condensed milk and Dora the Explorer backpacks, you can still encounter the optimism of a young American artist who found his voice on the walls. Isamu Noguchi was in his 20s when he went to Mexico (he had an affair with Frida Kahlo while he was there, if you're into art gossip), and for the walls of the Mercado Presidente Abelardo L. Rodriguez he conceived a deep sculptural relief that interweaves Wall Street skyscrapers, test tubes and beakers, and faceless workers charging to victory over a looming swastika. Spanning three walls and 72 feet, built up out of cement and brick, Noguchi's 'History Mexico' is his first public artwork, completed in 1936. What I appreciate most here is the civic confidence he expressed through the collisions of bayonets and skyscrapers, rising cranes and workers' fists — the certainty of a young artist that painting and sculpture were not personal utterances but public works. 'Here I suddenly no longer felt estranged as an artist,' Noguchi remembered later. In Mexico City, 'artists were useful people.' 4. The extravagant beauty of Sebastián López de Arteaga Mexico City, in constant reconstruction, may not be as rich in monuments of colonial Baroque architecture as Lima or Santo Domingo. But what the historical core does have is a great museum, an underrated one, whose collection of Spanish viceregal art lures me back every time I'm in town. At the Museo Nacional de Arte, better known as MUNAL, you can watch the flourishing of a passionate, hybridized style of painting in New Spain, where artists redeployed European techniques in another hemisphere. In the 17th century, Spain, Flanders and what's now Mexico were all part of a single empire in constant motion, and their painters were linked up too. Artists from the continent set up shop in Mexico City. Local practitioners discovered innovations from the continent through a robust trans-Atlantic print culture. The gallery that always stops me in my tracks is a little room, a cabinet really, that lies about halfway through the viceregal wing. In Sebastián López de Arteaga's 'Betrothal of the Virgin and St. Joseph' (circa 1640), in the MUNAL collection, the dramatic shadows of Caravaggio collide with joyful dispersions of flowers. Heavily and even garishly ornamental, so delirious and death haunted, this is the headspring of a national imagery that endures today. 5. A monolithic riddle of land art, right on campus The campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Latin America's largest university, is something of an outdoor museum. Its dense collection of Bauhaus-influenced buildings, above all its mosaic-clad central library by Juan O'Gorman, reconciled Aztec design and planning with modern steel and concrete. More discreetly and excitingly, UNAM is also a significant venue for land art, and there's an ecological preserve to the south of the campus that offers a very different conception of Mexican monumentality. The Espacio Escultórico, inaugurated in 1979 by Federico Silva and a collective of artists, comprises 64 large triangular stone prisms, forming a ring around a lake of hardened lava 400 feet in diameter. Where the Muralists painted for society, here was an art for the earth: hard and ceremonial, grand and indifferent, as conversant with pre-Hispanic cosmology as with the geometric abstraction that was in vogue here through the 1960s and 1970s. The university liked it so much that it invited the artists individually to make other large-scale sculptures, but their collective wheel of stone is by far the most unusual and compelling. Of course the concrete and the lava make for prime selfie backdrops, but the real reason to trek to this strange ring is to rediscover an era of experimentation between the Muralists' era and ours. These artists knew that Mexican art had more than one way to be monumental, and were ready to forge it. More Art to Discover Find all of these on our Google map of Mexico City.
Vogue
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Museo Casa Kahlo, a New Frida Kahlo Museum, Will Open in Mexico City This Fall
In 1904, the Hungarian-German immigrant Guillermo Kahlo built a house in the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City. There, he would raise his children and establish himself as a sought-after photographer, documenting the region's Colonial architecture. One of his daughters, Frida, would even help her father in the dark room, developing negatives, retouching photos, and arguably beginning her artistic education. As an adult, Frida Kahlo would occupy the same house with her husband, Diego Rivera, transforming it into a gathering place for great personalities of the era: Leon Trotsky, Henry Moore, André Breton. The house has had a vibrant afterlife as well. In 1958, four years after Kahlo's death, it was converted into the now-beloved Museo Frida Kahlo (known to many as Casa Azul), which vies with the National Museum of Anthropology for the rank of most-visited museum in Mexico City. Salma Hayek, paying tribute to one of Kahlo's most iconic paintings, 1939's The Two Fridas, for Vogue. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, December 2001 Last night, a new chapter in Kahlo's story was announced at the Park Avenue residence of Christine and Stephen Schwarzman: The public opening of a Museo Casa Kahlo, adjacent to the storied Casa Azul, will take place on September 27. Already dubbed 'Casa Roja,' the building where the new museum will be housed was originally owned by Frida Kahlo's parents; she later purchased it from them as a home for her sister Christina and Christina's family. 'Cristina was by her side through so much,' says Frida Hentschel Romeo, Kahlo's great-grand-niece, 'traveling with her to New York for her first major exhibition, supporting her through surgeries and recovery.' Frida Hentschel, Mara Romeo Kahlo, and Mara De Anda Romeo Photo: Julieta Cervantes Kahlo's closest living descendants—Mara Romeo Kahlo (Christina's granddaughter and Kahlo's grand-niece), her daughter Mara Deanda Kahlo (Kahlo's great-grand-niece), and Hentschel Romeo—came to New York to publicize the new institution. 'For the first time, the voice of the family will be at the heart of how Frida's story is told,' says Hentschel Romeo. 'This museum isn't just about her work—it's about her world. It's about how the people closest to her shaped who she became. And it's also about the living family—those of us who carry her legacy forward.' The museum will exhibit personal items that have never been shown before, including letters, childhood photographs, a piece of embroidery Kahlo made at the age of five, dolls, jewelry, clothing, and the very first oil painting she ever created. This was the painting, says Hentschel Romeo, that Kahlo showed to Diego Rivera to determine if she had the skill to become a painter. 'It is incredibly moving to see up close,' she adds. The museum will also showcase a newly discovered mural—believed to be the only Frida Kahlo mural in existence.
