The work of Mexican Surrealist and icon Frida Kahlo has made its first appearance at The Art Institute of Chicago in an exhibition entitled Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds. This inaugural exhibit highlights her relationship with Mary Reynolds, an avant-garde bookbinder artist in her own right, who is also linked closely to the Surrealist movement through her life-long personal and rich intellectual relationship to Dada/Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp. This is the first exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s work at The Art Institute, but by no means her first exhibition in Chicago. The Cleve Carney Museum of Art at The College of DuPage in suburban Glen Ellyn presented 26 works in an exhibition entitled Frida Kahlo: Timeless in 2021. Her first Chicago show was hosted by The Museum of Contemporary Art, another world-class Chicago venue.
The Art Institute of Chicago’s Mary Reynolds Collection, housed in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries (archives), contains approximately 600 items including including letters, photographs, government documents, Surrealist journals, and 70 unique artist book bindings crafted by Mary Reynolds herself.
Like much of the European avant-garde, the Surrealist movement has the notorious reputation of being male-dominated, and both Frida Kahlo (married to Mexican Social Realist muralist painter Diego Riviera) and Mary Reynolds were both forced to utilize their relationships to be acknowledged in the international artistic community. While the exhibit does include affectionate correspondence from their respective partners, it is the relationship between these two groundbreaking women artists that forms the conceptual backbone of the exhibit.
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The work of Mexican Surrealist and cultural icon Frida Kahlo is presented for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago in the exhibition Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds. This landmark exhibition centers on Kahlo’s relationship with Mary Reynolds, a Chicago-born artist and avant-garde bookbinder whose practice and intellectual commitments positioned her within the Surrealist milieu. Reynolds maintained a sustained personal and artistic association with Marcel Duchamp, a foundational figure of both the Dada and Surrealist movements, and her work offers a compelling entry point for examining the intersection of gender, modernism, and international avant-garde networks.
While this exhibition marks Kahlo’s debut at the Art Institute, it does not constitute her first appearance in the Chicago art world. In 1978, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago hosted one of the earliest major presentations of Kahlo’s work in the United States. More recently, in 2021, The Cleve Carney Museum of Art at The College of DuPage (Glen Ellyn, IL) mounted Frida Kahlo: Timeless, a significant retrospective comprising 26 works on loan from the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City.
The Art Institute’s engagement with Mary Reynolds extends beyond this exhibition. The museum houses the Mary Reynolds Collection within its Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, an archive of approximately 600 items including correspondence, photographs, official records, and Surrealist periodicals. Notably, the collection also includes approximately 70 of Reynolds’ unique artist book bindings, exemplifying her technical mastery and aesthetic contributions to the field of modern book arts.
While the exhibition includes epistolary material from their male partners, its conceptual emphasis lies in the artistic and intellectual rapport between Kahlo and Reynolds. The exhibition seeks to foreground the significance of their transnational friendship as a site of creative exchange, resistance, and mutual recognition within the larger framework of 20th-century modernism.