Frida Kahlo, Me and My Parrots (Yo y mis pericos), 1941

Narrator: In this painting, Frida Kahlo wears a white top, traditional for Zapotec women in the Oaxacan city of Tehuantepec. Tehuantepec was a favorite subject of Mexican artists during the years covered by this exhibition—you’ll see it featured in many works in this gallery, and even in a tourism commercial. Kahlo often drew on Tehuantepec’s traditions in her intense, expressive self-portraits that often reflected on mortality and other existential questions. 

Judith Baca: The parrot! One of the parrots in this image is looking out. The eyes are really similar between her eyes and the parrot. She had this total identification with creatures.

Narrator: Since the 1970s, muralist Judith Baca has been a leader of the Chicano arts movement, which combines art and activism to celebrate Mexican-American identity. 

Judith Baca: I think what she was doing is using what she had at her hand, and she was creating a kind of magical realism that is absolutely within the folk history, absolutely within the Mexican sensibility. Also a belief that there is a very thin veil between the moment we’re living in and the other side and the relationship to death, not to be feared, but to be understood as the natural condition of living, of what it means to be human.