Art History and Disability Studies

Why this article?

Introduction to Disability Studies (in Art History).

Terrific examples of Ekphrasis.

Art as evidence.

Path to the present that connects our brief studies of Surrealism, Feminism, Queer Theory in Art History, Intersectionality and Disability Studies in Art History.

As I lead a close reading of the first 6 pages,

Frida Kahlo, Remembrance of an Open Wound, 1938

In Remembrance of an Open Wound (1938), Mexican artist Frida Kahlo painted herself seated in a chair against a barren landscape, staring with an unyielding and unashamed returned gaze at the viewer and lifting her Tehuana-Mexican dress to display her bare legs. Her left leg, which caused the artist pain and impairments throughout her life due to childhood polio and an accident on a Mexico City bus at the age of eighteen, is wounded by leafy thorns and spurts blood onto her dress. Her left foot, which was amputated at the end of her life in the 1950s, is pictured bandaged and also bleeding. Roots that sprout from Kahlo’s body and connect it to nature, a crown of flowers and thorns on her head, and the thorny site of her seemingly self-inflicted scars evoke imagery of Aztec sacrifice and healing rituals, as well as Christian martyrdom, influences characteristic of Kahlo’s oeuvres. The title of the painting appears on a flowing ribbon within the composition, reminiscent of Mexican retablos,

Retablo Painting

devotional images of creolized Mexican-Indian/ Catholic saints performing healing rituals that were painted on wood panels and were quite popular in modern Mexican religious and vernacular culture. Themes of self- scarring and martyrdom in this work have been related to Kahlo’s biography and disabilities, the many infidelities of her husband (Mexican muralist and painter Diego Rivera), and specifically a recent sexual affair between Rivera with Kahlo’s sister, Cristina Kahlo. Lifting the elaborate native Indian dress she was known for wearing, in this painting Kahlo reveals her wounds, and yet, a strictly biographical reading of these wounds veils their potent symbolism within the multireferential composition.

Frida Kahlo, Two Fridas, 1939

Surpassing reference to one specific event, Kahlo’s wounds are psychic, sexual, and corporeal, as her wounded and painted body is marked by her personal and cultural history. The dress itself represents intersections between cultural signs and Kahlo’s individual style and has been a detail misunderstood, in my opinion, by many viewers who make assumptions about her body as broken, wounded, and degenerate due to her disabilities. Kahlo’s main biographer, Hayden Herrera, and many others have suggested that Kahlo wore such dresses to “hide” her limp and the scars from her accident and many surgeries, ignoring the period trend among the intellectual elite to wear such costume as a symbol of Mexican Nationalism. Further, as depicted in this painting, the dress serves as an instrument of revealing and concealing and Kahlo’s mediation of her disabilities for the public. She raises her skirt to reveal the wounds, placed strategically and erotically on the upper thigh, yet she holds the hem down over the space at the center of the canvas to which the viewer’s eyes are drawn—between her parted legs. In her painted self-image, Kahlo performatively covers and simultaneously flaunts her sex with manipulation of the dress. The dress frames and showcases the wounds she purposively displays for the viewer, as her brightly colored, elaborately patterned and ornamental costumes in real life would have attracted additional attention to her body. These dresses become a means for ornamentation and glorification of the body, and a means for the wearer, or performer, to self-direct the stares her body received in everyday life, due to her limp and other impairments.

DRAWING AT DUKE: Frida Kahlo

Remembrance of an Open Wound is one of over a hundred self-portraits, many executed from Kahlo’s bed during times of convalescence with an elaborately staged easel and overhead mirror. These self-portraits often display Kahlo’s personal and medical body histories in images of her numerous miscarriages, surgeries, recoveries, and physical degeneration. The “self” portrayed in Kahlo’s work emerges as a body in pieces—graphically ripped apart, wounded, bleeding, and impaled. Other works in her oeuvres document her friends, family, Native Indian, German, and Spanish-Mexican heritages, medical experiences, personal tragedies, daily domestic life in early twentieth-century Mexico, and her international travels. Each work is a carefully choreographed, symbolically and visually dense, not to mention colorful composition, rather than a one-dimensional depiction of her “suffering,” a characteristic reading of Kahlo’s paintings that has overshadowed their rich significances. Kahlo’s paintings serve as public performances of identity whose significances and legacy exceed the frames of her disabled body, as well as the frames of her historical context.

Kahlo’s work falls before the contemporary time period that is the focus of this book, but her influence looms large in contemporary artworks, as well as in my analyses of them. Kahlo was ahead of her time in her unashamed, graphic, and performative bodily displays of disability. Many more recent artists have drawn inspiration and vivid imagery from Kahlo’s compositions, for a range of reasons.

Carmen Lomas Garza, Lotería-Tabla Llena, 1972, hand-colored etching and aquatint on paper, image: 13 7⁄8 x 17 5⁄8 in. (35.3 x 44.9 cm) sheet: 16 3⁄4 x 21 in. (42.5 x 53.3 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, 1995.50.59, © 1972, Carmen Lomas Garza

California-based artist Carmen Lomas Garza was instrumental in reintroducing Kahlo’s work to the public in the 1970s, particularly to a next generation of Hispanic artists and audiences. Lomas Garza’s many prints of her Chicano/a home life and neighborhoods feature cultural and everyday heroes of the barrio, some without their lower left limbs and some using wheelchairs, actively engaged in social activities, such as in the depiction of a neighborhood social game in Loteria-Table Llena, (1972). Lomas Garza’s images display acts of disabled people as everyday occurrences in community life. Her curatorial work with Kahlo’s paintings has introduced her own ongoing influence by Kahlo and has helped Kahlo to become an artistic hero in the Chicano/a arts and rights movements of the 1970s and beyond, as contemporary artists include images of Kahlo and her naïve Mayan and Aztec imagery in their political work. Kahlo’s inclusion of creolized (Mexican-Indian/Catholic) religious themes has also inspired the work of Kathy Vargas, which includes many traditional Mexican and Mexican-American objects of healing and other miracles (milagros, often in the form of body parts, flowers, and other ritual objects believed to be incarnated by spirits), derived from ancient Mayan and Aztec spirituality. Kahlo’s imagery of her body in pieces and ancient rituals (such as sacrifice) translates to photographs inspired by Vargas’s work with AIDS and hospice patients, the deaths of her grandparents, and most profoundly, her mother’s illness. In Broken Column: Mother (1997), Vargas creates a cross shape in separate collaged photographs, many based on spinal X-rays, of an ailing, prostrate body that directly references Kahlo’s The Broken Column (1944), Kahlo’s self-portrait with her spine in pieces and her torso surrounded by a medical brace. Vargas’s works become ritual objects in their own rights, as Kahlo’s imagery functions in the transformative powers of healing.

Broken Column: Mother – Works – Toledo Museum of Art

Amazon.com: McGaw Graphics The Broken Column, 1944 by Frida Kahlo, Wall Art Print Poster, Paper Size 24" x 18" Image Size 21" x 16.5" (1157): Posters & Prints

Vargas, Broken Column, 1997, and Kahlo, Broken Column, 1944

Kahlo’s work also captured the attention of the predominantly white feminist art movement. In the 1970s, many feminist artists and scholars explored the politics of gender in the art world, worked to resurrect underrecognized female artists of the past, and revived traditional female arts and crafts practices, disrupting traditional and gendered hierarchies of art practices. In this spirit, Miriam Schapiro began making quilts and other collage works inspired by and including images of female artists whose work had been previously excluded from or trivialized by the canon of art history. These works evolved over time and expanded to series, such as Collaboration Series: Frida Kahlo and Me (c. 1988–1993). This series of mixed-media collages (including, for examples, Time, Conservatory, and Agony in the Garden, which is also based on The Broken Column) were modeled after prominent works by Kahlo and became a means for Schapiro to collaborate with Kahlo on new works and to identify with her as a female artist. Using paint, fabric, paper, and glitter, Schapiro glorifies Kahlo’s self-portraits, many of which display Kahlo’s body in pieces and in pain, and Kahlo’s personal history in contemporary feminist works.

Frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas, 1944

As a sampling of artists deeply affected by Kahlo’s legacy, Lomas Garza, Schapiro, Vargas, and Finger produce works in mixed media that perform their mixed social and cultural identities. All have been drawn to and identified with Kahlo for their own for specific reasons, because of interests in gender, race, sexuality, and disability. All are drawn to Kahlo’s defiant assertion of her body and its many stages, images, and transfigurations and her adamant exhibition of this body as the site of and source for artistic production and personal expression. All these themes emerge in particular forms in Kahlo’s and these later artists’ works, yet none of them are exclusive. Uniting the works are themes of the struggle to make artwork about the body in a sexist, racist, homophobic, and ableist world—a world from which a body such as Kahlo’s has been largely rejected and analytically misunderstood. Merging the fields of art history and disability studies, the following chapters explore what one can learn about art from the perspective of disability (as exemplified by my viewing of Kahlo’s dress) and, in exchange, what one can learn about disability through contemporary art. This period in art (late 1960s to present) sets the stage for relevant themes of self-exhibition, identity, and the role of the body in art and society, as well as introduces significant use of photography and performance art as mediums for bodily representation.