She had planned on becoming a doctor, this woman. This politico. This artista. However, in 1925 Frida Kahlo became not a doctor but a perpetual patient, for during a bus ride in September of that year she was impaled by an iron handrail. In the midst of her long recovery, Frida began to create what critics would argue to be life-affirming art in which she revealed her point of view as a woman with disabilities.
During the bus collision, Frida sustained multiple injuries to her pelvis, spine, collarbone and leg (broken in eleven places). Her uterus and abdomen were punctured. She was locked into a full body cast and prescribed rest, her future set as an inválida, an ill and disabled woman. But before the accident, Frida was described by her future husband as having ‘strange fire in her eyes,’ and that spirit did not diminish although she faced some very dark days as she navigated living with limited movement and nearly constant pain.
Frida’s recovery bed lay flat, so she spent her time staring at the ceiling until her parents intervened, encouraging her to paint. They believed Frida was much more than the sum of her injuries. Her mother attached a specially made easel to her bed and fastened a mirror atop its four posters, allowing Frida to view herself as muse. Her memory of this period was expressed through her paintings, perhaps most vividly Without Hope (1945) in which she depicts herself pinned under bedcovers, buried by an easel.
Her close friend and fellow activist, Andrés Henestrosa (1906-2008), explained that Frida ‘lived dying,’ and this mindset was evidenced by her art. A Few Small Nips (1935), Thinking About Death (1943), The Broken Column (1944), all envisage the damage her body could not overcome, confirming Frida was a realist toward the difficulties of being both a woman and disabled. She did not portray herself as having conquered the deficits of her physical form. Instead, she presented herself living and suffering amidst physical disabilities—as a Mexicyotl, as a woman, as indigenous. In doing so, she expanded the possibility of who she was and how others viewed her.
Writing in a 1953 letter to her husband, Frida explained that saw herself as ‘a maimed woman,’ believed she had been ‘incomplete for a long time.’ Yet the fire in her eyes, the blaze of her talent, was never contained by the plaster corsets or prosthetic leg she wore until her death. Deeply entrenched by thoughts of her pain and limitations, she was still a revolutionary, a leader, a catalyst. And by her example, she created a vision of what disabled could mean. Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón (1907-1954).