In the hands of the faithful, Frida Kahlo is that and more

CAGGIANNO’S “LA DOLOROSSA” AT PICTURE THIS GALLERY

What is it with crippled, whiny women and art? Why do we love it so much when Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and Britney Spears dribble their emotional polio all over us? Edna St. Vincent Millay may have been big in her day, but the poetry written while she was smoking cigars in bed was too kick-ass, and so you’ve never heard of her.

No, the women must be punished, and the saddest and most trod-upon get to wear the crown. Take Dickinson, Plath and Spears, and mix in a monobrow and a barren womb and a roving husband who sticks his dick in all the wrong places, and you have the queens of them all: Frida Kahlo and the junior senator from New York.

Snap!

On a sweet, old-fashioned street near City College, where Latin bookstores and just the right number of restaurants and cafes crowd out any kind of chain, the Picture This frame shop and gallery holds court.

Mattie Gomez has owned the little store just shy of 11 years, and on the walls over the table selling handcrafted Kashmiri embroidered purses and Peruvian Alpaca finger puppets, are the works of art of which she is so proud. This time, it’s Gomez’s annual celebration of Frida Kahlo—this year, marking what would have been her 100th birthday.

More than 100 people entered Picture This’s open call for Kahlo-inspired works, but the jury didn’t choose any of the (many) reproductions. Instead, there are portraits of Kahlo, or portraits of the artists as Kahlo, or retablos featuring St.-Virgin-Kahlo.

They’re sweet works—so loving!—and most of them show their love by glamming up Kahlo till she wouldn’t have recognized herself. Melanie Block-Gottlieb’s prettily geometric and fractured Frida/Diego . . . One Heart is probably the most obvious example of magical thinking, considering Diego stomped all over their purported shared heart just about every time he drew breath.

Moses M. Prado’s Frida is glammed up too, but she at least is more realistic: like in a Lichtenstein Pop cartoon, a thought bubble over her head asks, “But will he make me happy?” I’m going to go with “No.”

Jose Angel Hernandez’s Frida, meanwhile, is so chic he even shows her nipples through her sheer shirt. Yowza!

People will have their own favorites: perhaps Shannon Jones’ A Ribbon Around a Bomb, which illustrates Kahlo if she were a piece of tattoo flash. Or you might prefer Joseph Banuelos’ Mija, which takes a sad wooden doll, sticks her in a poofy gold folklorico skirt, severs her right leg, and sticks her to a weathered board. (I’m pretty partial to Banuelos, but that’s probably just my pre-post-feminist showing. Something about a tortured doll tickles me every single time.)

But while much of the company works in a naïve style Kahlo would have appreciated (or stolen), there are several works of perfect sophistication, and Kahlo was always that. Carole Gelker’s Frida Smoking With Ribbon paints her a corpsy lime and sea green, showing up vividly on her background of mottled lavender. It’s of a piece with Kahlo’s time and comrades, but still seems bold today.

Ricardo Perez’s Pez, meanwhile, with Kahlo’s papier mache head bobbling above a canister in John McCracken resinated red, gives her the Warhol treatment: person as object, star as commodity. And Jonathan Garcia’s La Bella Artista is lovely: her portrait is boxed over a layer of nappy black velvet, its computer-generated layers popping out at you in three dimensions. It’s utterly vibrant, exquisitely made—and if Kahlo has a glamorous touch of Salma Hayek to her, well, she might not have complained.

FRIDA KAHLO 100TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION PICTURE THIS GALLERY & CUSTOM FRAMING | 4130 NORSE WAY | LONG BEACH 90808 | 562.425.4861 | OPEN TUES-FRI 10AM-6PM AND SAT 10AM-2PM | CLOSING RECEPTION NOV 3

Tags: corpsy, frida kahlo, Long Beach, picture this gallery