In this video, we will study the importance of Frida’s relationship with politics and how it served her to build a completely distinct persona. We will explore the origins of one of her most famous artworks, My Dress Hangs There, which she made while she was in New York with her husband, Diego Rivera. To help you navigate this video, we recommend you answer the following questions as you watch it.
Why do you think she changed the date she was born?
How does this gesture help us understand her work differently?
Why do you think it was so crucial for her, her communist ideology?
Why do you think she justified her political perspective in her Diary at the end of her life?
Why did she start to paint, and how did that change her relationship with painting and art?
How did her ailments affect her political persona and view of the revolution? (Notice what she says in her Diary about it)
Contextualising the painting, how do you think the political origins of Muralism affected her work?
How did it affect her political standpoint, Rivera’s ideologies and behaviours? Why did he expel himself from the communist party?
Why was their trip to the US such a striking paradox?
What did it occur in Detroit while Diego was painting his mural that made her change her perspective on the United States?
Why was it so frustrating for Frida what they lived through in New York? Why was Rivera forced to destroy his mural?
Why do you think she structured the painting My Dress Hangs There as a collage?
Why did she divide the composition in two?
Why did she give so little attention in the composition to the act of her leaving in the boat?
How did she depict Trinity Church and the Federal Hall? What message did she want to convey with this description?
Why do you think she added this graph?
Why did she add that symbol to the window?
Why do you think she painted this billboard with Mae West that way?
Why did she make this dramatic difference in how she depicted the lower part of the frame?
Why do you think she used photographs instead?
Why do you think she set the building on fire?
Why do you think she depicted those columns in the middle of the composition?
What are the various interpretations of the meaning of her Tehuana dress?
Do you think it is just a serpent skin representing her desire to leave?
Why do you think she chose it, confronting it with the rest of the composition?
Why do you think I said her life was full of contradictions? Why is it so controversial that it was Diego who suggested she would use that dress in the first place? Does this mean that she owes her personality to him?
Why do you think he exerted such an influence on her?
How does she represent her initial relationship and devotion in her 1931 painting?
How does she express the body language to foretell and describe their relationship?