After contracting polio as a child and being mangled in a bus crash as a teenager, Frida Kahlo had life long health issues that ultimately caused her to die young. Her struggles with health were a theme she often explored in her art, depicting herself in or with wheelchairs, spinal support braces and hospital equipment and even decorating the plaster support corsets and (towards the end of her life) prosthetic leg.
Frida admired her parents but also hated them, feeling they were cruel and unloving. Also her father was German (she claimed in later life that he was Jewish but he wasn't) and her mother was half Spanish and half indigenous, yet Frida - inspired by the impoverished indigenous peasant women who acted as domestic servants in her wealthy family home - put on a show of dressing like a Tehuana because she was drawn to the suppressed indigenous culture's highly matriarcal structure, and her unplucked monobrow was a bold rejection of conventional Western beauty norms. She also hated white people, despite mostly being one herself, stating "I don’t like the gringos at all. They’re very boring, and they’ve all got faces like unbaked rolls"
Her husband, Diego Rivera, was jealous when she received attention. He was also of largely European descent and claimed his mother was descended from the Conversos (Sephardic Jews forced to convert to Christianity in 14th century Spain) although she wasn't. He was commissioned for a mural by the Rockerfellers and, upon being criticised for having overt Communist themes, added a portrait of Lenin, ultimately resulting in him losing the commission and the mural being destroyed.
Together they spearheaded the Mexicanidad movement, capitalising off Mexican indigenous folk culture, despising Americans (who made up a significant chunk of their customers) and never shutting the fuck up about Communism.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. I actually quite like Frida Kahlo's art and went to go see the "Making Herself Up" exhibition in the Victoria & Albert Museum (which happened because the wardens of Casa Azul ignored her dying wishes and broke into her room and took out all her personal belongings and clothes to send on a world tour).
My reason for this art history sperg is just to pose a simple question: why might a munchie BPD goblin who's obsessed with claiming various physical ailments recommend Frida Kahlo to a half-Mestizo who hates his parents (but larps as an indigenous Peruvian) and "Communist" that argues that trans women don't need to conform to conventional beauty norms to be valid?