Taken up by fans, feminists, malcontents, ideologists, and ax-grinders, Frida Kahlo [3] has become much more than an artist over the last couple of decades. Yet somehow she is also often presented as less than an artist. In conjunction with Walker Art Center’s Kahlo [4] exhibition, Grupo Soap [5], an alliance of artists who share a Hispanic heritage as well as robust senses of occasion and humor, will give its take on the Frida phenomenon. Last year the group produced four-by-eight-foot woodcuts printed by steamroller for a Día de los Muertos show. A poster for a 2001 show featuring the artists as luchadores (Mexican wrestlers) still hangs on walls all over town (the show was good, too). So expect their efforts to restore Kahlo as a complex artist and Mexican citizen as well as an iconic sufferer—Our Lady of a Thousand Coffee Mugs—to be both serious and facetious.
Grupo Soap del Corazón [6] and Art Jones Gallery, Casket Arts Building, 681 17th Ave. N.E., Minneapolis.
