My Grandparents, My Parents, and I

Frida Kahlo, 1936 · Gallery 517 · Floor 5

It's painted on a sheet of zinc. Not canvas. Metal. About the size of a record sleeve. That's how Mexican retablos were made. You come through something bad. The fever breaks. The truck misses you. So you paint the disaster. You paint the saint who pulled you out. Then you hang it in a church. Ya know. Thank you, cause I'm still here. Frida and Diego Rivera collected hundreds of them. This isn't one exactly. No saint. No miracle. But she borrows the metal and the scale for a family tree. So here's what she puts on it. Four grandparents up in the sky. Her mother's family over Mexico on the left. Her father's family over the Atlantic on the right. Her parents in the middle, traced from their wedding photograph. Her mother's hand still resting on her father's shoulder. Exactly where the photographer left it. And one red ribbon running through all of them. It forks twice at the top. Below that, one line. Down from the left. Behind her parents. Along the bottom. Back up the other side. Frida is at the low point. A naked kid in the courtyard, holding the loop. She's too big for her own house, which she's drawn flat, from above, like a floor plan. Blue walls. On her mother's dress, a fetus. Down in the dirt by the cactus, an egg with sperm coming at it. Her own conception, squeezed into the family tree. This is 1936. A year earlier, Nazi Germany passed the Nuremberg Race Laws. Now a family tree could be used against you. List your grandparents. Prove your blood. She makes one too. But Frida had a loose relationship with official records. She liked to say her father was a Hungarian Jew. He wasn't. He was a German Lutheran, a jeweler's son from Pforzheim. She says she was born in 1910, the year the Mexican Revolution began. She wasn't. She was already three. Her official birth certificate said 1907.

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