The Center of Southwest Studies kicks-off its summer lecture series based on this year’s theme, “Hispanidad,” with a presentation from Judith Reynolds, Fridamania: The Life, Art, and Cultural Legacy of Frida Kahlo, on Wednesday, June 26th at 1:30 p.m. in the Center’s Lyceum Room #120. This lecture is free and open to the public.

Long before there was a Frida Barbie Doll, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) achieved world fame as an artist, communist, and proto-feminist. Today’s “Fridamania” has spawned everything from refrigerator magnets, Frida-emojis, children’s books, an opera, and exhibitions brimming with commercial products and artifacts, rather than her art. Reynolds will briefly examine the consequences of Kahlo’s celebrity and focus on her extraordinary pictorial output, a unique, autobiographical record of a woman’s life of aspiration and fortitude.

Judith Reynolds is a journalist, art historian, and political cartoonist. After a career in academia, she switched to the for-profit world of journalism and eventually became arts then managing editor of an upstate New York newspaper. In 1994, Reynolds and her late husband, David, moved to Durango where she began freelancing for the Durango Herald and teaching occasionally at Fort Lewis College.