Homage to Frida Kahlo's "Thinking About Death"
About the Hoop
This 7” hoop was inspired by Kahlo’s 1943 painting “Thinking About Death.” The focal point of this piece is the visual window into Frida’s thoughts, positioned in place of a third eye on her forehead. I utilized an Indonesian skull bead surrounded by an embroidered version of the small pastoral landscape depicted in the painting. Frida’s gaze is somber, her hair bound tightly to the top of her head. She is wearing a blouse of upcycled sari fabric with additional beadwork and a collar of sequins. For the background, I used a sequin technique inspired by Haitian folk art to represent the dense jungle leaves. I created the vines using a braided, twisting embroidery stitch of my own invention.
Scroll down for more pictures. Available for purchase at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift shop.
About the Painting
This artwork is thematically linked to Kahlo’s “Self-Portrait as Tehuana” in which she depicted herself with Diego’s face superimposed over her third eye. In this image, a skull and crossbones replace Diego in her thoughts, and instead of her Tehuana headdress and the tendrils reaching out from it, she is posed against a jungle background. As Hayden Herrera says, “Again there is no exit from obsessional thoughts. Yet Frida’s confrontation with death is almost Egyptian in it imperturbability; indeed, her portrait recalls the famous bust of Nefertiti, of whom she said, ‘I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been ‘a wild one’ and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband.’” (Herrera, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, p. 167)
