Seeing Frida Kahlo Through Disabled Peoples Perspectives

 

Seeing Frida Kahlo Through Disabled Peoples Perspectives

 

By Corbett Joan OToole

 

Presentation at the DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA

February 2020

 

 

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

 

 

I want to acknowledge that we are gathered on the ancestral and unceded land of the Muwekma [Mah-wek-mah] Ohlone peoples. I ask you to join me in acknowledging these communities, their elders both past and present, as well as future generations. I say this to note that I am a settler on this land. I offer my gratitude to these elders who protected and preserved this land so that we may be here today.

 

I want to thank the de Young Museum particularly Karen Berniker and the Docent Council for inviting me to speak about Frida Kahlo from a disability-positive perspective.

 

DISABLED PEOPLE AND MUSEUMS

 

MUSEUM WEBSITES ON ACCESS

 

I will start where most disabled people start when considering going to a museum - at museum websites.

 

When I am going to a museum that is new to me, I look at their website to get accessibility information. I want to learn not only IF they provide access information but also HOW they frame it.

 

For example, I want to know if the information is easy to find. Is it in the “Visit Us” tab or is it buried somewhere deep in the website?

 

I also want to know if they perceive me as a welcome visitor or as an “other” who requires “special” arrangements because they design their exhibits for a narrow range of “normal” bodyminds.

 

 

 

Researching this talk sent me to many different museum websites. I found these very different messages for disabled visitors on the websites of two major art museums.

 

The first museum website tells me the price of admission and that of one companion, their price is the same. In this case both of us are free.

I appreciate this thoughtfulness for economic access since nearly all people with permanent disabilities live below the poverty line.

 

 

The website information from the second museum has a strikingly different tone. It tells me the admission price for a disabled visitor and also the price for one companion.

 

But note that while the first museum presumes that anyone might be accompanying me, the second museum assumes that my companion will be a caregiver.

 

There are a number of ways this is problematic.

 

The website information from the second museum has a strikingly different tone. It tells me the admission price for a disabled visitor and also the price for one companion.

 

But note that while the first museum presumes that anyone might be accompanying me, the second museum assumes that my companion will be a caregiver.

 

There are a number of ways this is problematic.

First, it tells me as a museum visitor that I, and my access needs, are going to be viewed through a medical lens.

Second, it requires me to identify my companion as a “caregiver” in order to receive the discounted ticket for them.

Putting that language there encourages the ticket staff to give me my tickets to my companion with the words “here is your caregiver ticket and your disabled ticket”.

Or perhaps even worse, they ask the person accompanying me to prove they are my caregiver.

Imagine this happening when I am on a date or with a prospective employer or with my adult daughter.

 

DISABLED PEOPLE ALWAYS IN MUSEUMS

 Using medical language, such as “caregiver” presumes that people with disabilities only attend museums with nondisabled people in a helper role.

The history of disabled people and museums tells a very different story. People with disabilities have been in museums since they opened. We are making the art on the walls. We are volunteers, docents and staff as well as visitors.

 

 

Recently the Smithsonian invited visitors to provide audio descriptions on their mobile devices for the 136 million objects in the Smithsonian’s public collections. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

 

Museum experts on audio description, such as UC Berkeley’s Georgina Kleege, find that audio descriptions from a variety of viewpoints, such as through crowd sourcing, provides richer and more useful information to the visitors who use them.

 

CURATORIAL SIDE

 

While great strides are being made on the visitor side, it can be hard to see the shifts on the curatorial side.

Like so many communities before us, people with disabilities have largely been absent in the curatorial rooms. There are many reasons for this but the impact is easily seen by visitors.

One common problem is that even when our bodies are present, our disabled selves are often erased. In 2011 I visited the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’s new exhibit on Pre-Columbian artifacts.^⁠

There were two small statues which clearly showed disabled bodies. One showed a person with osteogenesis imperfecta (brittle bone disease)

The other showed an adult with Achondroplasia dwarfism.

 

Both were mislabeled by the museum. The figure showing a person with brittle bone disease was labeled an “imaginary figure”, while the adult with dwarfism was labeled as a “child”.

  As a disabled visitor I immediately knew that there was no disability expertise in the curatorial rooms for that exhibit. I knew this because these types of disabled bodies are part of my visual library that I developed over years of knowing people with different disabilities as my friends and colleagues.

I imagine that for the curatorial staff of that exhibit, they don’t expect disabled people, our experiences and bodies to be present in their collections. 

 

Z

 

Asian-American Deaf artist Christine Sun Kim captures the frustration of disabled artists dealing with museums in her series “Degrees of my Deaf Rage in the Art World”

 

 

 

As an artist she is furious that “Curators who think it’s fair to split my fee with interpreters”.

 

 

And as a Deaf artist trying to bring more Deaf people into museums she has “full on rage” for “Museums with zero deaf programming (and no Deaf docents or educators).

 

As Richard Sandell, a disability museum expert from the Research Center for Museums in England tartly states:

 “If you look in most museums, you’d think disabled people didn’t exist, but they’re the world’s biggest minority,” he said. “I can guarantee every museum has material in their store rooms that can speak to the story of disabled people.”

One of the main goals of this talk is to invite you to consider questions that may not have occurred to you in regards to Frida Kahlo and her work. I will be putting them throughout this presentation but here are some that specifically refer to the benefits and limitations of having a person with my specific demographic give this talk. I am a white queer U.S. born woman who has polio. At various points in my life I walked, used a cane, and now use wheelchairs.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

What you get by having a physically and culturally disabled person talk about Frida Kahlo?

What you miss when that person is white, US born and raised?

What perspectives would Latinx disabled artists bring to exhibits on Frida Kahlo?

How would Mexican disabled artists curate / interpret these items?

 

EVERYONE TOUCHED BY DISABILITY

 

“Unless we die very young in an accident, almost all of us will experience illness and disability as we age. Trauma and disability are essential parts of what make us human, and what connects us to one another. Those with more trauma and disability carry more of the burden of stigma and ableism, and yet these are near universal human experiences" Rabbi Elliot Kukla

 

Over the past few decades the U.S. Census has included people with disabilities.  The most recent data shows that:

* nearly one in five Americans lives with a disability

 

Yet most people don't realize that because we have all been taught from a very early age that having a disability is not a positive characteristic so people often hide their disabilities.

 

This problem is not unique to the U.S. but a widespread pattern around the world.

 

The reason that disabled people are not in the classroom with you or on the job with you is purely because we systemically exclude people with disabilities from the nondisabled mainstream.

 

I'm laying this groundwork before we talk about Frida Kahlo because it is impossible to discuss Kahlo and her art work without understanding that her experiences as a person with a visible disability directly impacted not only her daily life but also how her life and work is interpreted in museums.

 

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER
What are the implications of ignoring Frida Kahlo’s disabilities when we discuss her life and work?

What are the implications of only focusing on her disability and ignoring her gender, class, and country?

 

 

THE MYTH OF “NORMAL”

One of the biggest myths about Frida Kahlo is that she is an aberrant “other”. She is often viewed as being “broken”, “sick”, “ashamed of her body” or just plain “weird”.

 

All of these framings presume that there is a “normal” body – one that is not sick or injured or just “too different”.

 

The image on this slide shows Akemi Nishida, a Japanese disabled woman who is currently a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. She is standing at a disability rights rally holding a sign that states:
“Normal is a dryer setting!!!”

 

The disability rights movement is founded on the belief that disabled people face multiple barriers that limit their life opportunities.

And

That being disabled is a political act despite society’s failure to recognize disability as a valid identity with its own community, history, culture and stake in all sociopolitical issues.

 

Persimmon Blackbridge is a queer disabled white feminist artist. Her work looks at identities are inscribed on our bodies.

Blackbridge notes that

“When an artist makes a figure, they are confronted with all the identities that society reads onto our physical selves: gender, race, size, ability and disability,”

“You can grapple with how to represent our complex and diverse selves or you can pretend that some default normal body represents us in all our wild human difference.”

 

 FRIDA AND DISABILITY

 

Now I will be exploring ways to think about Frida Kahlo’s experience of disability. But just as women, go through the world having very different experiences than men, people with visible disabilities have very different experiences than nondisabled people.

From an early age disability was present in Frida Kahlo's life. She grew up with a father who had epilepsy. At the age of seven she contracted polio. The polio impacted the growth of her legs and she walked with a noticeable limp for the rest of her life. When she was 18, an accident occurred when she was riding the bus. The effects of the accident are the most thoroughly documented of her disabilities and her primary medical focus for the rest of her life.

 

This slide shows photos of Frida Kahlo taken by her father, a professional photographer, at ages 4 when she was nondisabled. At age 12 after she’d had polio a few years and at age 19, a year after the bus accident.

 

On the bottom part of the slide, is a drawing that Kahlo made in 1931 showing pencil sketches of each of these photos.

Her demeanor changes significantly in both the photos and drawings as she ages.

 

It's striking to me that in all the accounts we have of Frida’s childhood after she had polio, she was not only attending schools and getting a good education but she was also working with her father in his photography studio.

 

Research by the National Center on Parents with Disabilities shows that children who grew up with disabled parents become better at problem-solving and more resilient than children who do not grow with disabled parents.

 

To me an entire line a research opens up when we look at what it meant for Frida Kahlo to grow up with a disabled father who worked as a professional photographer.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

What was the impact on Frida Kahlo growing up with a disabled father?

 

 

MEDICAL GAZE

 

 I want to pause and explore disabled peoples’ relationship to the medical system.

 

When someone has a severe accident, such as what happened to Frida at age 18, the natural reaction is to turn to the medical system for a cure. Crisis management, diagnosis, and treatment of short-term curable problems are strengths of Western medicine.

 

But long term, incurable medical conditions are not. As many people with disabilities can tell you, medical resources for long-term disability is often significantly less effective at giving someone a good quality of life than resources found by connecting with others living with similar chronic conditions.

Frida Kahlo's decision to repeatedly look for cure within a medical system that is demonstrably unable to provide for people with complex medical needs is fascinating.

 

I would guess that most of us in this room over the age of 50 are living with some kind of chronic condition. And I would also guess that at the beginning of it, the first few years, we sought a cure from the medical world. When that didn't work, we started making adjustments to our lives in order to live with this chronic condition.

 

After five or 10 years, the chronic condition just becomes part of everyday life. If we are lucky we have a condition that's common enough that there are good online resources put together by people with similar conditions. And if we are extremely lucky we get to meet people with similar conditions and get both support and resources that come from their lived experience.

 

So in summary, for new medical problems people seek a medical cure. For Long term medical problems creating a life with quality means looking for ways to learn to live with it by making life adjustments and finding resources and community with others who have similar situations.

What's striking to me about all of the research on Frida Kahlo, is that the focus is nearly always presumes that she is “sick”. Meaning that the discussions of her various medical conditions, specifically related to the accident, focus on grief, loss, isolation, and the medical cure. And very little writing, except by disabled people, focuses on her as someone with “permanent disabilities”.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER
Is there a difference in our perceptions of Kahlo if we view her as “sick” or “permanently disabled”?

 

 

MEDICAL GAZE

 

I want to spend a few minutes exploring the way that Kahlo and her art works are viewed with a Medical Gaze. Hallmarks of the Medical Gaze include: viewing people as sick, viewing people as the other, viewing people as dependent.

 

What is the MEDICAL GAZE? Where is the focus?

o   Medical information is important

o   Medical professionals are experts

o   Focus on cure

o   Nondisabled family speak for the disabled person

On the patient side, the Medical Gaze requires the disabled person

o   must be compliant with medical professionals

o   must comply with the “sick” role

o   sole focus is to “get better”

o   important not to be a burden

o   important to be grateful to nondisabled people

o   and one must not consort with other disabled people

    

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

How does the Medical Gaze impact our understanding of Kahlo’s life and work?
What does adhering to a “sick” role require of Kahlo as an artist?

WALL TEXT

 

One of my big questions going into the research for this talk was whether or not the Medical Gaze would be prominent in museum exhibits on Frida Kahlo.

To prepare for this talk I reviewed exhibit object lists, exhibit wall text, reviews of exhibits, and interviews with curators of exhibits on Frida Kahlo in 3 countries: Mexico, England and the United States.

 

I particularly focused on exhibits related to the objects found in 2004 at the Blue House.

I found that these exhibits frequently had roughly 250 objects. Of these:

o   50-60 Medical related objects including medical notes, equipment, medications, images of doctors, etc.

o   50 personal objects (make up, jewelry, clothing, etc)

o   30 art made by Frida (60% paintings, 40% drawings)

o   10 objects focused on Diego Rivera (photos, artwork)

o   4 photos of her making art

 

By themselves these objects are neutral. Looking at a sample of the wall text for the exhibits brings some focus and tells us the perspectives of the curatorial staff.

 

Using 2,600 words as a typical length, these Frida Kahlo exhibits mentioned:

 

•       50 name: Frida Kahlo / Frida / Kahlo

•       24 Medical (Sick / accident / operation / corset / etc.)

•       19 Tehuana / Native / indigenous

•       14 name: Diego Rivera / Diego / Rivera / husband

•       7 times Frida is referred to as an Artist

•       5 father: Guillermo Kahlo / father / epileptic

•       4 times Diego is referred to as an Artist

•       3 name: Doctors

•       1 personality descriptor - Intelligent & outspoken (pre-accident descriptor)

The objects can be interpreted in many ways but many exhibit wall texts lean heavily towards a Medical Gaze by focusing on medical framings, prioritizing nondisabled others, and framing the objects from a nondisabled perspective.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

Does exhibit wall text frame objects in relation to a medical gaze?

How does this show up in curating and reviewing Frida Kahlo’s work and life?

 

 

MEDICAL GAZE 

 

Throughout exhibits of her work, focus is often more on her medical conditions than her art.

 

Focus -  MEDICAL INFORMATION IS IMPORTANT

-           Always mention her medical conditions

-           Include doctor’s notes

-           Focus on ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’

Focus - MEDICAL EXPERTS

-           give medical professionals a prominent place

-           Dr. Juan Farill and Frida Kahlo in her studio at La Casa Azul

 

FOCUS ON FIXING THE BROKEN BODY

-           what medical interventions were done

-           how many surgeries

-           prominently include medical equipment

 

Exhibits on Frida often tie her choice of clothing to shame about her body.
“The adornment of the dress is centered around the upper part of the body.. obliging the viewer to focus on Frida’s upper body and providing her with the opportunity to edit and fragment herself, distracting the viewer from her legs and lower part of her body.”

 

This comment is extremely common in discussions of Frida’s choice of clothing.

 

       QUESTIONS TO PONDER

Did Kahlo wear long skirts because she was ashamed of her legs or because she wanted to stop the Medical Gaze from strangers?

 

 

FOCUS ON CURE

 

There are many ex-votos in exhibits as well as in Kahlo’s Blue House. Ex-votos are small hand-painted stories of a tragedy such as an accident or severe illness – and the family is praying for divine intervention, often from the Virgin.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

Did Kahlo have ex-votos because she was hoping for a divine cure or because she felt connected to people who’s suffered physical trauma?

How might exhibit wall text frame objects in relation to a Loving Disabled Gaze? Some examples of different wall text.

 

o   Focus on Frida’s art

o   Present the disabled artist’s experiences with a positive focus

o   Equipment as background not foreground focus

o   Medical information is minimal

o   Disabled person defines her own experiences

o   Nondisabled people’s perspectives are important only if brought into the art or documentation of making the work by the disabled person

 

 

 

FRIDA EMBRACING HER DISABILITIES

 

 

The Wellcome Collection in London is a museum and library focused on science and medicine.

 

One might think this is the last place to look for advice on disability-positive framings of objects.

 

But the Wellcome Collection takes the position that what’s been missing is the stories of users of objects, especially medically-related objects. 

 

So when they present an object, such as an orthopedic corset, the wall text focuses on the experiences and knowledge of users of orthopedic corsets.

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

 Why did Kahlo decorate her plaster corsets?

 

        

FRIDA & DOROTHEA LANGE

 

Connecting to other people with similar disabilities is a critical part of survival. Other disabled people will provide knowledge of medical resources, adaptive strategies, provide us with a loving disabled gaze.

We have very little information at present about how Frida Kahlo connected with other disabled people.

One of the few examples of Frida Kahlo connecting with another disabled woman is her relationship with Dorothea Lange, the famous photographer.

 

 

In the early 1930s Frida Kahlo accompanied her Diego Rivera to San Francisco where she met the photographer Dorothea Lange.

This photo by photographer Imogen Cunningham from 1931 shows how Kahlo looked at the time they met.

The two women bonded over many things – they were strong women artists, they both had polio and walked with a limp; both had artist husbands; both took strong political stands for justice and both had philandering husbands.

Lange, who was 12 years older, offered Kahlo support and studio space as well. As their friendship developed, Kahlo shared some of her medical concerns with Lange.

One of Lange’s clients was Dr. Leo Eloesser, a respected thoracic surgeon who also spoke Spanish who went on to become a lifelong friend and medical consultant for Kahlo.

I want to note that sharing resources, particularly medical-related resources, is a key benefit of disabled people knowing each other.

One of the ironies of the friendship between Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Lange was their opposite approaches to self-portraits.

Kahlo frequently created self-portraits while Lange only created one.

For me this difference also illustrates the ways in which Kahlo developed a loving disabled gaze on her own body while Lange kept to a more medicalized gaze of hers.

As white disabled author Anne Finger describes her imagined Frida Kahlo on her short story Helen & Frida, a loving disabled gaze is used:

“Frida, who lifts her skirt to reveal the gaping, cunt-like wound on her leg, who rips her body open to reveal her back, a broken column, her back corset with it’s white canvas straps framing her beautiful breasts, her body stuck with nails: but she can’t be Disabled, she’s Sexual.”

Frida, you painted those endless self-portraits but you always looked at yourself live, straight on, in full light.

 

In all those self-portraits, you are simultaneously artist and subject, lover and beloved, the bride of yourself.”

 

Dorothea Lange got polio at the age of 7 – the same as Frida. Both immediately adopted long socks and pants to cover the atrophy that resulted from the polio.

But while Kahlo was painting her disabled body for all to see, Lange was hiding it.

 

This photo by Imogen Cunningham shows Dorothea Lange around the time she took the photo of her right polio foot.

In fact, in her entire life, Dorothea Lange only took ONE self-portrait – and not until she was in her 60s.

While teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in the 1950’s, Lange gave her photography students an assignment to produce a photograph on the theme, “where I live.”

She invited them to consider what their lives were really about.

Her friend and fellow photographer, Imogen Cunningham, challenged Lange to do the same assignment.  Lange took photographs of her own polio foot in response.

 

 

Of her polio, Lange writes “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All those things at once. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and the power of it.”

 

QUESTIONS TO PONDER

How does disability shame show up in self portraits?

 

Nearly all the writings about Frida Kahlo laying in bed portray it as a dismal experience. The idea of being in long convalescence is assumed to be a horrible experience.

FRIDA IN BED

 

This is a typical description:

“During her months of confinement to a bed after the bus accident, Kahlo mastered the art of self-obsession.”

Yet many people I know have created a life in bed and written about being in bed as a more nuanced experience.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla, a Jewish disabled transman, spent nearly 4 years in bed. He writes:

“Eventually, I stopped pushing for a cure. I stopped trying to “overcome” disability, and started to live a full sick and disabled life. As the pace of my outer life slowed, my inner life expanded in unexpected ways. Some days, being chronically ill just really sucks; on other days, it offers stillness. Empathy. Solitude. The tender intimacy and vulnerability of receiving care. I am grateful that my pain and discomfort have now eased, and that I no longer live my life in bed. But sometimes, I miss the profound and painful spirituality of bed life.”   Rabbi Elliot Kukla

Queer disabled Latinx artist, Annie Segura, who’s social media name is Annie Elainey, also spent long periods of time in bed.  

She created art showing her connection to Frida Kahlo’s ability to document the complexity of bed life.

The images of Frida’s life and art on the slides are the ones Annie chose to accompany her text.

ANNIE SAYS:

“As I was looking through Frida Kahlo’s image results on Google, 

it really hit me how she absolutely REFUSED to be invisible as someone with chronic pain.

 

There are so many photos of her in bed, there are so many photos of her with her working/painting in bed,

photos of her casts, photos of her sitting down while others are standing up.

It would’ve been so easy to be invisible to the world

 

She could have very easily said, “I never want my picture taken when I’m in bed”. 

 

It’s not a particularly common portrait; to see photos of people in bed, but that’s where she spent a lot of her time and so she wanted these pictures to live. 

 

She included her bed and her casts and her pain in her art as well.

I’m so thankful for that visibility, I’ve yet to see another person in history that I could identify with so much.”

 

CONTEMPORARY DISABLED WOMEN ARTISTS

 

I am ending today’s presentation by looking at how Frida Kahlo’s insistence on creating her own life and on celebrating her own body directly impacts contemporary disabled women artists.

 

The first images are from Taiwanese disabled artist Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi who lives in Chicago.

 

Sandie calls her work “Crip Couture”

These slides show the hand prosthetics she made for herself and disabled artist Sunaura Taylor.

Rather than rejection the notion of physical alteration, I have created intimate and empathetic bodily adornment, not as a correctional physical aid, 

 

 

 

but as a tool for remapping and engaging with a new physical terrain, one embodied with personal standards of physical comfort and self-defined ideals of beauty.

 

The next slide is a self portrait

 

By Sunaura Taylor, a UC Berkeley professor, who is an animal rights and disability rights activist and artist. In this portrait she paints herself next to a manatee since both their bodies have the same shape.

 

White disabled PORTRAIT ARTIST Riva Lehrer created this self portrait showing herself naked from the waist up while she walks through water.

 

She titled it “66 degrees” which is the amount of measurable curvature in her spine.

 

This final self-portrait from a disabled artist is from Patricia Berne

Patty spends a lot of time in bed and runs the disability justice arts organization, Sins Invalid, from her bed.

 

This self portrait combines elements of her Haitian and Japanese heritage with a joyful artistic portrait of herself.

 

 

WHY I WANTED TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT FRIDA KAHLO

 

I tell you my final story to give you context about my first encounter with Frida’s paintings.

 

My first encounter with Frida was in the beautiful color plates in the middle of Hayden Herrera’s book on her in 1980s the year.

 

By then I’d been part of the disability rights event in Berkeley. I was part of a month-long occupation of the federal building with 150 people, mostly disabled, and had plenty of friends with disabilities.

Even within this very rich background, Kahlo’s simple reproductions reach down and grabbed my heart. She showed a view of the world of vulnerability, pain, and the passion inside my disabled body I've never seen anything like it before.

 

Even though I was a low-paid childcare worker, making $600 dollars month, when I saw that her paintings were going to Los Angeles I knew I needed to go.

 

I drove down to LA with a friend and went to the huge exhibit on 30 centuries of Mexican Art at the Los Angeles county museum. As I turned the corner into the last room the sight of Frida’s paintings stopped me in my tracks.

 

The paintings were so large in my mind yet so small on these walls. I slowly moved from painting to painting noticing that the color reproductions in books were technically accurate but missing all of the emotional power of the originals.

 

After I've circled the room I parked my self in the middle of the exhibit and wept. I felt like someone had taken all the secrets inside me and put them up on the wall. For the first time in my life I felt seen and beautiful.

 

Her art shows how living with disabilities feels in the body.

The pain of surgery. What postsurgical pain looks like.

The duality of living a subjugated disabled life while wearing the costume of non-disability in order to have access to the nondisabled world.

 

Frida’s paintings screamed I am here. I am powerful. Nothing can destroy me. I am my own creation. I am beautiful. I deserve to be surrounded by beauty. I deserve to be loved and admired.

 

I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity you’ve given me today.

 

 

THANK YOU