The Willow Theatre is proud to present “Viva la Vida: The Life and Work of Frida Kahlo” at Willow Theatre on January 21, 2027!
Description:
Presented by Rubén Yepes Muñoz
Frida Kahlo turned her Mexican identity and her own life, physical pain, and politics into some of the most iconic images in modern art. Born in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1907, her life was shaped early by illness and later by a serious bus accident that left her with lifelong injuries and led her to painting during a long recovery. Over the following decades, she produced a compelling and idiosyncratic body of self-portraits and symbolic works that drew on Mexican folk culture, surrealism, and her own physical and emotional experience, including her complicated marriage to muralist Diego Rivera. This talk looks past the accident narrative that has come to define her popular image, to consider Kahlo as an artist who defied social convention in her politics, her relationships, and her art, and who approached both her art and life, however constrained by pain, with striking vitality and determination.
Rubén Yepes Muñoz is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Visual Art and Art History Department at Florida Atlantic University. He received his Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in 2017, with a dissertation on the mediation of the Colombian armed conflict in contemporary visual art. He is the author of five books, including his recent Affecting the Conflict: Mediations of the Colombian War in Contemporary Art and Film (2025) and Estudios visuales desde América Latina: un aporte a la consolidación del campo (2024). He is also the author of over twenty articles and book chapters. His current research focuses on the art created in response to the multidimensional crises that emerged in Latin America during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the genealogy of Latin American Visual Studies. Dr. Yepes Muñoz has received several prestigious awards, including the National Prize for Scholarly Essay on Colombian Art (Colombia), a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholarship.
Performance is 65 minutes, with no intermission. Rated G.
Price:
$8 Per Person
$5 Group Rate (10 or more tickets purchased in a single transaction)
$5 Season Ticket