“ I am not sick. I am broken but I am happy as long as i can paint.” - Frida Kahlo. Frida Kahlo is an iconic mexican artist, she influenced many people with art from her childhood to her deathbed through incredible art and personal experiences.

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacan Mexico, a former village in Mexico. Frida’s mother, Matilde de Calderon y Gonzalez was catholic and Indigenous, Matilde had four daughters with Guillermo Kahlo. Guillermo Kahlo was born in Germany and he sailed to Mexico in 1841, he changed his German forname Wilhelm to Guillermo because it’s the spanish version of his name. When Frida was three years old the mexican revolution began and in her writings she recalled men climbing and jumping over the walls into her backyard and sometime her mom, Matilde would cook for the men fighting in the revolution. Frida was also diagnosed with polio when she was six, this left her right leg thinner so she would cover it with long dresses and skirts.

Frida Kahlo was very political and a leftist, she attended the National Preparatory school where she was one of the 35 girls to attend. Frida was a member of the mexican communist party in the 1920’s and she was a member of a group that talked about socialism mixed with cultural nationalism, when Kahlo was member of the parties she taught young people about the revolutionary war in Mexico. Frida Kahlo has a few political paintings one of them is a self portrait “on the borderline between between Mexico and the U.S” (1932)  where Frida stands in a landscape between the industrialized U.S and a preindustrial Mexico. Another political painting Frida made is “Marxism will give health to the sick” (1954), this painting shows Frida with a body brace and crutches with a face of  Karl Marx in the sky. Eleven days before Frida Kahlo died she participated in a public protest against U.S intervention in Guatemala.

Frida Kahlo went through a horrible accident in September of 1925 that damaged her physical and mental health. Frida and her boyfriend at the time, Alex Gomez Arias we’re in downtown Mexico and got on a bus that would take them back to Coyoacan, after they got on the bus the bus driver turned into the street Calzada de Taipan and a street trolley came, when the driver tried to pass in front of the trolley the bus got ran into. The bus a had a weird elasticity and kept bending for a while until it reached its final maximal flexibility and burst into pieces, the train kept moving  and ran over many people. Frida was laying on the ground nude because the collision unfastened her clothes and the handrail went through her pelvis. Frida’s spinal cord was broken in 3 places, her collar bone was broken, her ribs broke, her left leg had eleven fractures, and her pelvis broke in three places. The doctors didn’t think they could save her , they thought she was going to die on the operation table but she didn’t. It was when Frida was recovering she began to paint self portrait.  In Frida Kahlo’s painting “The broken column” (1944) shows the devastation of her body after the accident.

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo had a complicated relationship, some would even say toxic but they were a well known relationship. In 1928 after Frida’s accident, Frida asked Diego if he could encourage and help with her art and they started a romantic relationship but the age gap was huge, Diego was twenty years older than Frida and her parents weren't supportive of the relationship at first but Diego and Frida ended up married a year later. Frida was Diego’s third wife. Diego had multiple affairs and one of them was with Frida’s younger sister Cristina, when Frida found she pretended it didn’t hurt and said “how would I be able to love someone who wasn’t attractive to other woman” and had affairs of her own. Frida’s painting “memory, the heart” (1937) shows her pain over her husband's affairs.

Frida died on July 13, 1954 at age 47 and her house is now a museum called “La casa azul”. In 1958 Diego donated to the museum as well as the artwork created by both him and Frida and diego locked her belongings in a bathroom and demanded it to be locked until fifteen after his death, the room wasn’t opened until 2004.

Frida Kahlo didn’t paint her dreams she painted her reality and made an impact on society through painting her hardships and personal experiences. “ I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world  there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways i do. I would imagine her and imagine that she is just like me too, i hope that if youre reading this and know that yes it's true i'm here, and i'm just as strange as you”. -Frida Kahlo