By Frida Future
Featured Image is Viva La Vida (1954), the last painting Frida Kahlo made before she died
My Nurse and I (1937) 
Self Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (1940) 
Fruit of Life (1950s)
Editor’s Note from Sarah Penello:
This is part of the ongoing series, Astrocreatrix Spotlight, where Creatrix highlights artists who inspire members of our community, during the season of their birth.
In Gemini season Creatrix featured contemporary artist Lauren Chapman, and for Cancer season, I asked interdisciplinary artist and facilitator Frida Future to write about her connection to the legendary Cancer Queen, Frida Kahlo.
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was born on July 6, 1907, she left the world on July 13, 1954, and her chosen birthday (the date of the Mexican revolution) was July 7, 1910, making her a Cancer Sun, through and through.
Ruled by the moon, Cancer is a swell upon a shore, it’s tidal estuaries, the liminal spaces between worlds. It is nurturing and intimate. It is the sign of our homes and our inner psychic worlds. Cancer also rules the thresholds between the spiritual and material.
As a Cancer native, Frida Kahlo was able to paint her personal inner world and make it real for the rest of us. On this she famously said,
“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”
On a recent sojourn to La Casa Azul, my dear friend Frida Future called from the courtyard of her namesake. We discussed how Kahlo could never have children of her own, yet entire generations have chosen her as an ancestor. How her deeply personal and intimate works, made from the confinement she experienced much of her life, have resonated so deeply with the whole world.
The constellation of Cancer contains a star formation known as The Beehive Cluster, and as Jana always reminds me, the ancient symbol of Cancer was the Bee. Bees are sex made flesh- they make it possible for flowering and fruiting plants, upon which all animals depend, to reproduce. Honey is one of the most powerful medicines in human history, associated with healing since time immemorial.
How fitting then, that Frida Kahlo’s art, borne of her pain and isolation, went on to pollinate the minds of countless young artists.
The last painting Frida Kahlo completed before she died is a bright still life of juicy watermelons, one of which bears the instructions,
“Viva la Vida”
The watermelons are bursting with seeds, each one of which contains the spark of new life, the possibility for a whole new watermelon plant. As one of Frida Kahlo’s many children, I asked Frida Future to write about her connection to the artist, in celebration of Kahlo’s gifts to us, in the season of her birth and death, and her beloved Mexico’s rebirth.
By Frida Future
My visit to Frida Kahlo’s house moved me to tears, even as I waited outside the iconic blue walls. Finally! I’d made the pilgrimage to the home of my patron saint, a journey I’d longed for since I was a teenager.
Every little object in her house filled me with the most romantic longing. I wanted to touch the tchotchkes in her curio cabinet, run my fingers over anywhere she signed her name, see myself reflected in the mirror on her table that she used to paint her self-portraits. Palpable traces of her life force still emanate from everything she touched.
What more could I want for myself, than to so fully inhabit my own life and art, that 70 years after my death devotees might come to breathe a whiff of what remained?
I fell in love with Frida Kahlo for the first time at 17. As a young painter, her self-portraits were a permission slip to paint my own face. I was allowed to stare at my life and mine it for material: I didn’t have to make something more “important.”
My own story, my own pain, interests and personal iconography were enough. Her influence liberated me from concern about painting the “right” thing, and made a space for me to affirm that my own experience was not only worthy of being documented- but worthy of being the subject of fine art.
Frida Kahlo had an intimate, lifelong relationship with pain. A bout with childhood polio left her with one leg shorter than the other, a major accident skewered her womb, making childbearing impossible, and dozens of surgeries meant she spent a good portion of her adult life in plaster casts.
No stranger to emotional pain either, Frida’s life was marked by heartbreak throughout her tumultuous marriage and remarriage with muralist Diego Rivera.
Confined to her bed, exiled from her dreams of becoming a doctor, Frida turned to herself and her inner world as the subject of her art.
Rather than treating individual patients, Frida alchemized her personal experiences to create art, a salve for the aching of the human soul.
More than the grand, ambitious political murals of her husband Diego, it is the deeply personal, tender work of Frida’s intimate pieces that have stood the test of time to resonate with and inspire millions.
The visceral, lurid details of the personal are what makes Frida’s work so universal.
Frida Kahlo was a wayshower.
Her story makes me want to live fully, now, with all life’s misgivings and errors and aches and pains and injuries and traumas and hungers and sorrows.
My life is art, as much as whatever it is that I make.
Lived fully, life itself is enough.
It is more than enough. This wisdom is one of the gifts of Frida Kahlo’s life and work.
Although she could not have children of her own, many of us have claimed Frida.
We are her children, the ones emboldened enough to tell our own stories, knowing that somehow the mysteries of all of life are therein contained.
We are not afraid, we do not judge ourselves too harshly to keep from living out loud and singing our unique songs. We carry on creating our own identities, turning our pain into art, not only letting ourselves be seen but seizing the reigns of authorship to create our own images and the meanings we assign to them.
And not only that, in this lifetime we know it.
About Frida Future:
Frida Future is the High Priestess of the Church of the Cosmic Cunt. Her ministry is fulfilled through her work as a multidisciplinary artist, bodyworker, sex worker, event facilitator and educator. Though currently based in New York, she makes magic with the Cosmic Cunt Conference from Toronto to Oaxaca, Miami to LA.
