Wonder Woman of the Week: Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo’s life reads like a geography of pain and place, mapped across the vivid colors and sharp shadows of post-revolutionary Mexico. Born in 1907 in Coyoacán, then a quiet village on the outskirts of Mexico City, Kahlo came of age as the nation searched for a new cultural identity. A childhood marked by polio left her with lasting physical challenges, but it was a catastrophic bus accident at age eighteen that reshaped her body and her art. Confined for months in a plaster corset, Kahlo began painting herself with unflinching honesty, using a mirror mounted above her bed. These early works were not acts of vanity, but of survival—intimate studies of endurance set against the larger landscape of a country redefining itself.