Frida Kahlo’s household has introduced the 27 September opening of a brand new museum close to the famed Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico Metropolis. The transfer strengthens the neighbourhood’s standing because the main Kahlo pilgrimage website and reaffirms the artist’s international attain. Museo Casa Kahlo, often known as Casa Roja, will supply an intimate view of the artist’s youth, displaying the objects, paperwork and images her household stored on the house. It’s the first museum run by Kahlo’s descendants.
The property, usually frequented by Kahlo in her lifetime, belonged to her mother and father and later to her youthful sister, Cristina. It has remained within the household for many years, together with a non-public archive. That archive was first examined in Luis-Martín Lozano’s 2007 guide Frida Kahlo: El Círculo de los Afectos. Over time, curiosity within the website and its archive has grown. For years, Mara Romeo Kahlo, Kahlo’s grandniece and Cristina’s granddaughter, welcomed some researchers and public figures like Salma Hayek into her house, earlier than turning it right into a museum.
Casa Roja shares a moniker just like Casa Azul—Kahlo’s birthplace, which turned a museum in 1958 via a belief established by her accomplice, the artist Diego Rivera. Casa Azul focuses on Kahlo’s grownup life, whereas Casa Roja shall be devoted to the artist’s childhood with objects starting from Kahlo’s dolls, clothes and jewelry to non-public letters and images made by her photographer father, Guillermo. Cross-stitch work Kahlo did at age 5, her first oil portray and a lately found mural work (believed to be the one one she made) may also be on view.
Casa Roja shall be led by Adán García Fajardo, who at the moment serves as the educational director at Mexico Metropolis’s Museum of Reminiscence and Tolerance, and overseen by the newly based Fundación Kahlo—a New York-based non-profit that champions Latin American artwork and operates independently from the belief that manages Casa Azul. (That belief, operated by the Financial institution of Mexico, is at the moment immersed in controversy; the previous director Hilda Trujillo Soto claims that a few of Kahlo’s works are lacking from the museum, a problem carrying severe implications for Mexican heritage.)
Casa Roja will add to Coyoacán’s standing as a high vacation spot for Kahlo tourism. The world will now embrace two Kahlo museums subsequent to selfie-friendly life-size bronze statues and avenue murals. The brand new museum can also be a part of Mexico Metropolis’s rising variety of hybrid, privately owned cultural areas—Fundación Fernando Romero will quickly totally open the architect Luis Barragán’s La Cuadra San Cristóbal as nicely.
Casa Roja additional reinforces Kahlo’s seemingly infinite international enchantment. “Kahlo was capable of rework the private into one thing common, permitting folks to see and really feel themselves in her work,” says Celia Stahr, the creator of Frida in America: The Inventive Awakening of a Nice Artist (2020), highlighting Kahlo’s uncooked, susceptible language.
“Thirty years in the past, Fridamania was deemed a pattern, but Kahlo’s curiosity continues to develop past her artwork,” says the artwork historian Gregorio Luke. “In a manner, Frida staged her life as an paintings.”
Mara Romeo Kahlo instructed Vogue: “Frida’s legacy belongs to the world, however it begins right here—on this land, in these properties and within the tradition that formed her.”
