Experience the amazing art of Frida Kahlo in a new way

Mara R. Kahlo gets a bit emotional as she talks about the new multimedia art installation focusing on both the life and art of Frida Kahlo.

“You can see not only Frida the artist, you can see also the human being — the woman,” says the legendary artist’s only grandniece.

She is particularly moved by the fact that family pictures and other biographical details are included in the exhibit.

“Her family was also my family,” says Kahlo, who’s the president of Fundacion Familia Kahlo, the company that owns the global trademarks for the icon’s name and image, and also champions projects and issues that were important to the artist.

Overall, Kahlo seems thrilled with the holistic approach that producers have taken with “Immersive Frida Kahlo,” which makes its West Coast premiere at Lighthouse ArtSpace San Francisco, located at SVN West, on March 12.

The highly anticipated exhibit, which utilizes movement, music and projected imagery to “immerse” fans in the world of Kahlo, runs through June 11. And, like the van Gogh show, “Immersive Frida Kahlo” will offer affiliated yoga classes as well.

Tickets for the exhibit start at $40 at immersive-frida.com.

The installation, masterminded by Italian master of digital art Massimiliano Siccardi and featuring a score from Luca Longobardi, includes such acclaimed Kahlo artworks as “The Two Fridas” (1939), “The Wounded Deer” (1946) and “Diego and I” (1946). Yet, it also features photographs from various points in the artist’s life as well as drawings and iconography that help tell the compelling and often tragic story of Kahlo (1907-1954).

The exhibit is produced by Lighthouse Immersive, the same organization behind the popular “Immersive Van Gogh” experience that is still running at the same venue near the intersection of Van Ness and Market streets. (“Immersive Van Gogh” will be shown on select dates after the Friday Kahlo show has opened).

“When we launched van Gogh, we were really being pioneers in the whole immersive world in general,” says Lighthouse Immersive producer Vicente Fusco. “We were bringing a new way to experience art altogether. It’s a new way because of the size of it — the visuals, the music. The whole experience is very particular. So, van Gogh gave us the opportunity, as producers, to test the waters out.

“The result was amazing. Not only from an artistic perspective — which we were very satisfied with — but the response from the public was amazing.”

Immersive art exhibits have proved a big draw in the Bay Area, with nearly a dozen shows opening at a variety of museums and spacious venues in the past two years. An immersive show devoted to Pablo Picasso is on display at the Armory in San Francisco’s Mission and the San Jose Museum of Art has the immersive video installation “Factory of the Sun,” by German filmmaker Hito Steyerl, on display through September.

San Francisco makes an appropriate setting for the touring “Immersive Frida Kahlo” exhibit’s West Coast premiere, given the the Bay Area’s long-standing enthusiasm for the Mexican artist known for her stunning self-portraits and groundbreaking style that blended folk art and surrealism, championed Mexico’s indigenous people and touched on issues ranging from politics to popular culture to feminism.

Kahlo’s connection to the Bay Area goes beyond the area’s love of her art and persona. The artist and her husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera, lived in the Bay Area for several months in 1930 and both had numerous works displayed in San Francisco, especially Rivera, whose murals became fixtures at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the California School of Fine Arts, and the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island (one of his biggest and best-known works, “Pan American Unity,” is on display at SFMOMA through 2023).

Kahlo returned in 1940 to get treatment for her myriad health problems — stemming from her near-fatal injuries sustained in a 1925 bus accident and other problems — and shortly after she and Rivera remarried in the city. A icon to both the feminist and LGBTQ movements, Kahlo has been honored in the Castro neighborhood’s Rainbow Honor Walk, had a street named for her in San Francisco, and is regularly feted in festivals in Berkeley, San Jose and elsewhere.

She’s also had major posthumous exhibits at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008) and at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park (2020-21). A virtual version of the de Young show was downloaded more than 100,000 times, the museum said.

All of which makes the personal touch of “Immersive Frida Kahlo” seem more appropriate.

“You see the human side of Frida,” says Mara De Anda, Mara K. Kahlo’s daughter, who also works for Fundacion Familia Kahlo. “It’s not only about the artwork.”

“Frida had an amazing life,” Fusco says. “She painted her pain. She had amazing experiences. She had a lot of rough experiences. She had a lot of misfortunes on the health side of things. She shattered her spine at a very young age.

“Her marriage with Diego Rivera was a hurricane in itself,” Fusco adds. “There was so much sentiment and so much feeling with the Frida Kahlo experience in itself that we thought that there would be no better way to present this than in this format — which is the immersive format.”

Svetlana Dvoretsky, co-founder and executive producer of Lighthouse Immersive, told ArtNet News that the decision to embed the Frida Kahlo show with biographical elements had more to do with the nature of the artist than a perceived weakness of the van Gogh show.

“Frida is a representation of so many aspects of social and political issues in modern history. Massimiliano felt the special importance of showing who she was as a human being and a person, not just her art. Frida is Frida and Van Gogh is Van Gogh.”