Mexico

A posthumously celebrated artist and international feminist and LGBTQ+ icon, Frida Kahlo was greatly influenced by the culture and history of her native Mexico. Born in Mexico City, she was crippled by polio as a child and seriously injured in a tram accident at the age of 18. It was after her accident, whilst bedridden, that she turned to her childhood hobby of painting. Encouraged by her larger-than-life husband, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and drawing from the sustained physical suffering she experienced due to ill health, Kahlo’s art was inspired by native folk art and veered towards surrealism. Famed for her revelatory self-portraits, today few artists are as instantly recognisable, with her braided hair wound with a colourful ribbon, sporting a unibrow and wearing traditional Mexican pieces.

In Mexico City you can still immerse yourself in all things Frida. The Frida Kahlo Museum, also known as Casa Azul (the ‘Blue House’) due to its cobalt-blue walls, is a museum dedicated to her life and work where you can discover the artist’s private creative universe. Located on a quiet residential street in Coyoacán, one of the oldest and most beautiful neighbourhoods in Mexico City, it is the home where Kahlo was born, raised, lived with Rivera on and off, and died. To secure Kahlo’s legacy, on his death Rivera donated the home and its contents so it could act as a museum in her honour with the rooms and her personal items primarily remaining as they were in the 1950s. Also, in Coyoacán is the Cantina La Guadalupana, Kahlo and Rivera’s local watering hole which still retains its charm and decor.

To the west of Mexico City, in the affluent neighbourhood of San Angel, is the Museo Casa Estudio Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.  This was Kahlo and Rivera’s first proper marital home and later became Rivera’s studio. Designed by the couple’s friend, Mexican architect and artist Juan O’Gorman, the radical Cubist building behind the high cactus fence is actually two houses connected by a sky-high walkway where Kahlo’s house is painted a similar shade of blue to her house in Coyoacán.

The floating gardens of Xochimilco in the southern suburb of Mexico City are where Kahlo and her friends would go to rent a boat and escape the city heat on Sundays, and it’s still the best place to soak up Mexico’s atmospheric culture. Nearby is the Museo Dolores Olmedo Patino, a tranquil 17th-century mansion once owned by a wealthy businesswoman, patron of the arts and friend of Rivera’s, that now houses the largest single collection of both Rivera and Kahlo’s work.