A blockbuster exhibit honoring Frida Kahlo has opened at the New York Botanical Gardens, her first solo appearance in New York in a decade. FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life has a unique focus on Kahlo’s relationship with nature in her native country of Mexico. From her garden and home decor and the complex use of nature in the artist’s art, this New York Botanical Exhibit is the first to focus exclusively on Kahlo’s intense interest in the botanical world and will close on Nov. 1, 2015.

From the press release:

Guest curated by distinguished art historian and specialist in Mexican art, Adriana Zavala, Ph.D., the exhibition will transform many of The New York Botanical Garden’s spaces and gardens. It will reimagine Kahlo’s studio and garden at the Casa Azul (Blue House) in the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and include a rare display of more than a dozen original paintings and drawings on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Art Gallery.

Accompanying programs invite visitors to learn about Kahlo’s Mexico in new ways through poetry, lectures, Mexican-inspired shopping and dining experiences, and hands-on activities for kids. Bilingual texts in English and Spanish will provide historical and cultural background, with photos of the garden as it appeared during Kahlo’s lifetime, along with quotes from the artist about her home and connection to the botanical world.

The New York Times quotes curator Adriana Zavala. an associate professor of modern and contemporary Latin American art history and director of Latino studies at Tufts University, who agreed that the exhibition concept was a bit unusual. 

The unusual focus of the show turned out to be the strongest selling point for Ms. Zavala. She is impatient with the standard approaches to Kahlo, which tend to see the art, especially the self-portraits, as emblems in a now almost mythic life story. “I am not interested in the biographical march through the paintings,” she said. “My effort has always been to contextualize her.”

The flowers, fruits and vegetables prominent in Kahlo’s self-portraits, and even more so in her still lifes, gave Ms. Zavala the opportunity to examine key concepts in her art like duality, hybridity and cross-pollination, both natural and cultural. Kahlo took a mystical view of the relationship between humans and the cosmos, and she absorbed powerful oppositions — sun and moon, life and death, male and female — into the complex swirl of symbolic forms in her art.