
The showcase of Frida Kahlo’s longtime home outside of Mexico City, the Casa Azul (Blue House), was a garden cultivated with her husband Diego Rivera. In “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” Kahlo’s botanical oasis is reimagined in the Bronx. In the indigo-blue walled structure, native Mexican cacti and succulents adorn a re-creation of a zigguratlike form originally crafted to display Rivera’s collection of pre-Hispanic art, capturing the couple’s dedication to indigenous and folk Mexican heritage. And in the library art gallery, the complex plant imagery in works like Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) and Portrait of Luther Burbank (1931) mine the plants’ symbolic power. The natural motifs in the paintings are so detailed that NYBG botanists were able to determine the exact species depicted.