Long before there was a Frida Barbie Doll, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) achieved world fame as an artist, communist, and proto-feminist. Today’s Fridamania has spawned everything from refrigerator magnets, Frida-emojis, children’s books, an opera, and exhibitions brimming with commercial products and artifacts rather than her art.
Reynolds will briefly examine the consequences of Kahlo’s celebrity and focus on her extraordinary pictorial output, a unique, autobiographical record of a woman’s life of aspiration and fortitude.
Judith Reynolds is a journalist, art historian, and political cartoonist. After a career in academia, she switched to the for-profit world of journalism and eventually became arts then managing editor of an upstate New York newspaper. In 1994, Reynolds and her late husband, David, moved to Durango where she began freelancing for the Durango Herald and teaching occasionally at Fort Lewis College.
As a community volunteer, Reynolds launched the FLC Life Long Learning Lecture Series in 2000. Nineteen years later, the free, town-gown series continues and convenes every Thursday evening during the academic year. Next fall, Sept. 5, 2019, Reynolds will inaugurate the LLL series with a talk on the Confederate Statue Controversy titled: “White Guys on Horseback.”