Carolina A. Miranda reviews the exhibition Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, on view through October 5, 2014.
Miranda writes that the MCA exhibition "seeks to restore Kahlo’s artistic legacy. 'Sometimes, someone becomes so ubiquitous, they become invisible,' says MCA curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. 'She’s been so overshadowed by her celebrity that her work has become lost. Academia isn’t taking her seriously. People think, "She’s on a million postcards, so how avant-garde is it to do a show of her work?"' ... [The show] aims to put the emphasis back on Kahlo’s achievements by showing her paintings alongside work by contemporary artists. 'Frida Kahlo was dealing with issues not only of the physical state, but the psychological and the emotional,' Rodrigues Widholm explains. 'She was playing with the fluidity of gender. She was addressing issues of nationality and the construction of identity. She consciously chose local forms, but it was all steeped in the international language of art.'"
