Women Artists: Frida Kahlo 

Do Now: Imagine you could cast a magic spell. What would you do? What would it look like?

Today the 3rd and 4th graders were introduced to a new female artist, Frida Kahlo. Frida was a German-Mexican Artist who grew up in Mexico. She was married to artist Diego Rivera. 

First we watched a short video clip about Frida and her life. She had a difficult life and experienced many sad things. When she was very young, she became sick with a disease called Polio. It caused one of her legs to grow very slowly, and she usually wore long skirts to cover up her legs. She was also in a terrible trolley accident when she was a young adult. As Frida was recovering, she began to make art. Specifically, Frida made self-portraits. 55 out of her 143 paintings were of herself. 

We looked carefully at many of Frida's portraits, and came up with a list of 4 important features. 

1. She is staring at you/the person looking at the painting.

2. She looks very serious is her portraits.

3. The background, her clothing and her hair are all very colorful.

4. She is very hairy! She has a unibrow and a mustache in most of her portraits. 

After identifying these 4 facts, we talked about why. Frida's art helped her think about herself and deal with her emotions. Maybe women aren't "supposed" to be hairy, but Frida did not want to change the way she looked just because some people said she should be different. 

The 3rd and 4th graders were great listeners and asked great questions. Class was almost over before we got to start our project!

Our project will last 2-4 classes, so today we started part 1. Part 1 is drawing a portrait of Frida! We will finish next week.