“I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.” 

This quote will soon greet visitors as they enter a darkened Houston gallery filled not with oil paintings, but with relics of a life lived in public and in pain. Photographs, medical corsets, handwritten letters, cosmetics and magazine covers. This is not just an art exhibit. This is “Frida: The Making of an Icon,” which will show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) starting January 19 and running through May 17, 2026.

This is one of the more anticipated art mega events coming to Houston in recent memory. A deep dive into how one woman turned her pain into poetry and, eventually, a global phenomenon.  

Conceptualized and organized by Mari Carmen Ramírez, the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the MFAH and the founding director of the Museum’s International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), the exhibition will travel to the Tate Modern in London after its run in Houston.

Stretching across five decades of creative response, “Frida: The Making of an Icon” is set to feature 120 works from 80 painters, sculptors and photographers — artists who in one way or another trace their roots back to Frida Kahlo’s influence. Rather than being a retrospective, the exhibition will unfold like a visual family tree, showcasing Kahlo’s persona, political beliefs, cultural identity and iconic demeanor rippled outward through successive generations. 

Frida Kahlo Ripples

What links these artists isn’t solely style. It’s the undeniable fact that Kahlo left a mark they couldn’t ignore. Pioneering Chicano artist Rupert García’s silkscreen prints from the 1970s cast Kahlo’s unibrow and gaze as bold symbols of cultural pride and resistance, framing her as a political martyr and a banner for social justice. A prominent figure in the neo-Mexicanismo movement, Magali Lara’s work explores intimacy, feminism and corporeality. She revisits self portraits and personal iconography to evoke Kahlo’s frank emotional exposure and storytelling, emphasizing sensuality and the feministic gaze.

The exhibition will even addresse Fridamania — the widespread cultural fascination and even obsession with Kahlo, seen especially in the mass production of mugs, plates, phone cases, shoes, bags necklaces and even hairbrushes. All with Nickolas Muray’s Frida on a White Bench, New York printed on the merchandise. 

“‘Frida: the Making of an Icon’ attempts to separate Frida Kahlo the artist from Frida Kahlo the phenomenon,” Ramírez says, elaborating on her vision for the exhibition. “In exploring that process, the exhibition re-establishes Kahlo’s own identity, and asserts her persistent relevance to contemporary art as well as activism over the past 70 years. . .

“Frida Kahlo’s self-invention was as radical as her artwork.”

Although the head curator of this project is Ramírez, Dr. James Oles — independent curator, specialist in Latin American art, scholar and a senior lecturer at Wellesley College — serves as the consulting curator. The exhibition is complemented by a catalogue, co-published by the MFAH and Yale University Press, bringing together critical essays, historical analysis and original documents that offer a multifaceted portrait of Kahlo’s enduring impact.  

“They thought I was a Surrealist,” Frida once said. “But I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.”

“Frida: The Making of an Icon” is set to show just how many artists have turned to her reality to give life to their own.