Frida Kahlo and Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing in Mexico: Lecture by James Oles

Thursday, October 7 | 7 – 8 p.m.
In the 1930s, Frida Kahlo often wore–in her daily life and in her paintings–a particular costume associated with the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, consisting of a short embroidered blouse (huipil) and a long lace-fringed skirt (enagua). This tehuana costume, sometimes described as “indigenous,” is actually the product of mestizaje or cultural blending, an essential element in the construction of Mexican national identity in the post-Revolutionary period. Although partly inspired by Diego Rivera, whose own interest in tehuana culture dates to the early 1920s, Kahlo’s cross-cultural cross-dressing was also profoundly modern, following a well-established model with roots in the nineteenth century.

Fee: $15 ($8 member); $5 student with ID
Lecturer: James Oles, Senior Lecturer in Art at Wellesley College

Register for October 7

About the Speaker

James Oles is a specialist in Latin American art, focusing on modern Mexican art and architecture, through museum as well as academic projects. His books include South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination, 1914-1947 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) and Art and Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, 2013), the first survey of its kind in some fifty years, as well as books on artists as diverse as Helen Levitt, Agustín Lazo, and Pedro Friedeberg. He has also published scholarly essays in journals and museum catalogues on a wide variety of topics—from neo-Maya architecture to the color photography of Manuel Alvarez Bravo–with a focus on Mexican art of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Oles divides his time between the US and Mexico: he is Senior Lecturer in the Art Department at Wellesley College, and in 2002 was appointed adjunct curator of Latin American art at the Davis Museum, where he advises on exhibitions and the permanent collection. In early 2019 he curated Art_Latin_America: Against the Survey, featuring 150 works by 100 Latin American and Latinx artists in the permanent collection of the Davis Museum; he also edited a major scholarly catalogue for the exhibition, with contributions by 40 scholars.

As a guest curator, he has organized numerous exhibitions in Mexico and the US, at the Center for Creative Photography, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo Carrillo Gil, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, and Museo Nacional de Arte. His current projects include Diego Rivera’s America, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which opens in July 2022 and travels to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Mexichrome: Color and Photography in Mexico, the first comprehensive history of color photography in Mexico, organized by the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and slated to open in Fall 2022. He is editor of catalogues for both projects.