Kahlo Without Borders is organized by Cristina Kahlo, MSU Broad Art Museum executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut and Javier Roque Vázquez Juárez. Further exhibition support in Mexico was provided by Nuria Sadurni and Mariana Sainz. Support for this exhibition was provided by MSU Broad Art Museum advisory board member Hari Kern, MSU Federal Credit Union Artist Studio Series Endowment, and the Eli and Edythe Broad endowed exhibitions fund. For this exhibition at the MSU Broad Art Museum curatorial assistance was provided by Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez, curatorial assistant, and some translations were done by MSU student Cristina Alcantar.
About the Exhibition
Curated by artist, and Frida Kahlo’s grandniece, Cristina Kahlo, Javier Roque Vázquez Juárez, and MSU Broad Art Museum executive director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, Kahlo Without Borders will include photographs and facsimiles from family archives from the Cristina Kahlo collection and from the Oaxaca Museum of Stamp Collecting (Museo de la Filatelia en Oaxaca), and never-before-seen archives from the Medical Center ABC, where Frida Kahlo was interned.
The exhibition seeks to connect museum visitors to the intimate and creative world of Frida Kahlo by blurring the boundaries between her internal and external worlds, particularly towards the end of her life when she was a patient at the Medical Center ABC. Recently revealed documents pertaining to her final hospital stay will be of paramount interest equally to biographers, specialists in the field of art history, and healthcare workers. This unexpected, interdisciplinary (boldly traversing the fields of art and healthcare) yet intimate approach to the worlds of Frida Kahlo will be presented as an emotional journey through images, documents, and family and clinical archives—one similar to the poignant and enthralling experience of sorting through a family scrapbook or a trunk of memories. These files bear witness to her health challenges encouraging the visitor to imagine how, from a hospital bed and through the power of creativity and self-expression, she transformed the history of art of the 20th century.