The unlikely Frida Kahlo exhibition on the campus of a DuPage County community college has its roots in an even more unlikely situation: an effort to forestall international tensions on a Vail, Colorado, condo association board.
Beginning Saturday, there will be 26 Kahlo works plus much related material on view at the College of DuPage’s Cleve Carney Museum of Art, the largest collection of her work to be shown in the Chicago area since a 1978 Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition.
It’s a concentrated burst of the Mexican artist, such an icon at this point that one of the T-shirts on sale features just an outline of her head, a visage dominated by flowers in the hair and that instantly recognizable unibrow.
The works wouldn’t be at the Glen Ellyn museum at all if it weren’t for the friendship between Alan Peterson, a Glen Ellyn founder of a consulting business and longtime COD donor, and Carlos Phillips Olmedo, the director and son of the founder of Mexico City’s Dolores Olmedo Museum
And that friendship wouldn’t have happened, according to Peterson’s son, Mark, if his father hadn’t noticed that about half the condos in the ski town association he bought into in 1977 were owned by Mexicans, half by Americans.
“We had, like, 29 units, not a big building,” said Mark Peterson. “And he said, you know, if we’re going to get anything done, we need to be united, we can’t be too different. So he very quickly made a friend of Carlos, and then they both were on the board, the homeowner’s association, and they sort of traded off being president.
“You know, my dad would be president for five, six years. And then Carlos would be president for five, six years.”
The friendship was forged not only in the business of running a building but also in the families seeing one another socially during Colorado winters and in Alan Peterson helping Phillips Olmedo’s sons get into the business school at Northwestern, his alma mater, said Mark Peterson.
“They certainly had each other’s back,” the son said. “And they were able to get a lot of things done as a result of that.”
Surely the biggest of those things is “Frida Kahlo: Timeless,” an exhibition that was originally supposed to open last June but had to be postponed due to the pandemic. Its centerpiece is the 26 Kahlo works, 19 paintings and seven drawings, that the Olmedo Museum owns. Although only a few — especially “The Broken Column,” Kahlo’s self-portrait with her fractured spine visible amid her nude, corseted body — count among the most famous of Kahlo paintings, it’s an idiosyncratic and compelling selection of her work, in part because it was assembled by an avid collector.
“It’s a lovely story behind this exhibition,” said Adriana Jaramillo, the Olmedo’s communications and institutional relations director. “Eventually, just one day, Mr. Peterson asked Mr. Phillips, ‘What do we need to do to have your collection be shown here?’ And he said, ‘Well, just ask for it, one. And, two, let’s see if you meet the conditions.'”
“This was his last big dream,” Mark Peterson said of his father, who died last April at 90, after all the planning had been done but before he was able to see the works on the wall. “He said, ‘I want to bring Carlos’ art to College of DuPage.’ And I said to him, ‘Don’t you mean, like, the Art Institute or the Museum of Contemporary Art?’ He said, ‘No, the College of DuPage.'”
The college did some upgrades to meet the necessary conditions to host such internationally renowned works, about 10% of the 20th century artist’s entire painting oeuvre. It added 1,000 square feet of gallery space, and better security and air quality, while changing the name from the Carney Art Gallery to the more ambitious “museum.”
The Carney first announced the show in November 2018, so to finally see it hanging in front of people during a press preview was “joyful,” said Justin Witte, curator and director of the gallery. “It’s nerve-racking and also a relief. And it’s just great to finally see people looking at the work, spending time with the work.”
The museum went all-in to make it a full exhibition. As large as the galleries containing the artworks, the introductory space details Kahlo’s harrowing biography: born to a German father and Indigenous mother, came of age during the country’s revolution, suffered a devastating, nearly fatal bus accident in her late teens, the source of lifelong pain, dead at age 47.
The list of Kahlo’s medical history takes up an entire wall and matter-of-factly makes the case for a kind of heroism in the artist managing to get anything substantial done.
“There’s a lot of people who have a conception of who they think Kahlo is because of the level of Fridamania that kind of exists out there,” Witte said . “And it’s not always aligned with the true story. And I think that there are aspects of her story that are important to share: her activism, her different relationships, also just the importance of Mexico City and post-revolutionary Mexico. I think that’s really important for viewers to understand.”
In and around the biographical information — and lots of giant Frida photos — the museum has placed a selection of newly fabricated Kahlo outfits, a replica of her bed and even an artist’s interpretation of the corsets Kahlo wore to help with her spinal issues.
The exhibition includes plenty on the painter Diego Rivera, two times Kahlo’s husband, including her mother’s famous comment that theirs was the union of an elephant and dove. He is also featured in many of the show’s intimate family photographs, also from the Olmedo.
Out back, behind what is expected to be a margarita bar when COVID-19 restrictions loosen in the coming weeks, there’s a replica of the garden at Kahlo’s famous Casa Azul. And a children’s area offers activities and an interpretation of Kahlo aimed at the younger audience.
But the key, of course, is the artwork itself, which Dolores Olmedo acquired after Kahlo’s death from an ardent Kahlo collector. For that reason, Witte said, the works not only span the range of her career, but they are also more personal.
There is, for instance, a commissioned portrait of the horticulturist Luther Burbank depicted almost as one with the soil in a kind of hyper- or magical realism, that the Burbank family rejected.
Also on display is “Henry Ford Hospital,” a raw self-portrait marking the miscarriage Kahlo had while she and Rivera were visiting the United States.
“‘Henry Ford Hospital’ is one of those paintings that not only for Kahlo helped her to really define her voice, but it’s also one that really stands out as something new at the time, a new voice, a new visual language to talk about issues that people just weren’t talking about,” Witte said.
Although there are also more standard portraits in the exhibition, including of the aforementioned Kahlo collector, the engineer Eduardo Morillo Safa, it’s impossible to come away from it without thinking about how connected Kahlo’s life and her art were.
There’s one small painting, “The Circle,” from 1954, the final year of Kahlo’s life, that underscores the linkage, said Marcela Andrade Serment, the show’s associate curator.
“It’s so different from her other pieces,” she said. “Not only are we getting much smaller now, but it’s also like missing a lot of the finesse and detail in the painting like you would have seen otherwise in some of her earlier pieces. And I think it really shows you just how much her body was deteriorating at that point.
“I think if it wasn’t for painting, I don’t know that she would have lived for as long as she did. I think her painting really served as an outlet for a lot of what she was experiencing. And it really provided her with an outlet and a form of therapy to really put that out there.”
On view through Sept. 6, the show costs $23 for a timed-entry adult ticket before service fees, and tickets have been selling briskly, according to Carney Museum officials.
