How Kahlo collected, celebrated and depicted Mexican folk arts in both her painting and her persona.

The visionary and supremely self-fashioning artist Frida Kahlo (1907–54) drew inspiration throughout her career from arte popular—painted ceramics, embroidered textiles, religious votives, effigies and children's toys, and other objects created in Mexico’s rural and Indigenous communities. The hundreds of folk-art objects that filled her home and studio attest to her nationalist politics and her fascination with the work of carvers, weavers, sculptors of papier-mâché and vernacular painters. She depicted these objects in her paintings and adopted elements of traditional dress and ornament in her own self-presentation, playing on modernist fascination with folk culture and on her own relation to layered Mexican identity. Hardcover, 240 pages.