At the heart of Victoria’s winter cultural calendar is Frida Kahlo: In Her Own Image, a blockbuster exhibition that has attracted more than 50,000 ticket holders. The exhibition does not centre on Kahlo’s art, but rather on artifacts of her life: the carefully composed photographs taken of her, the clothing she wore, the perfume she used and the performances of identity she crafted and subverted. What is not at the centre of this exhibition, or of its public reception, is the fact that Frida Kahlo was a lifelong revolutionary and member of the Mexican Communist Party. The exhibit itself is a demonstration of the ability of bourgeois cultural institutions to display radical art (or, in this case, the radical artist) while at the same time stripping away the radicalism.

The Kahlo of global pop culture is a flattened image: a stoic face above a floral headdress, often printed on mugs, socks, and tote bags. She has become a brand; her image is plastered across fast fashion advertisements and self-help books about ‘resilience’ and ‘girlboss’ energy. Her image is even plastered on nearby coffee shops, with business owners capitalising on the exhibition to bring in customers, with Mexican tortillas and cocktails on the menu. What gets erased in this process is her political agency. Her anti-capitalism, her deep affiliations with the global communist movement, and her enduring critique of U.S. imperialism.

Frida Kahlo’s political awakening was not an afterthought to her art, it was foundational. In 1928, at the age of 21, she joined the Mexican Communist Party, aligning herself with a revolutionary movement that sought to dismantle capitalism and U.S. imperialist influence in Mexico and Latin America. It was during this period that she reconnected with Diego Rivera, already a celebrated muralist and prominent communist. Although they had first encountered each other years earlier at the National Preparatory School, it was through their mutual political engagement that a deeper relationship formed, both ideological and romantic. They married the following year, in 1929, and despite the volatility of their partnership, their shared commitment to Marxist principles endured.

Their home became a nexus of revolutionary art and politics. Both Kahlo and Rivera believed that art should serve the working class and reflect the struggles of the oppressed. Through their murals, paintings, and political activism, they maintained a strong connection to the international communist movement. Rivera had previously travelled to the Soviet Union and maintained ties with global leftist intellectuals. Kahlo’s politics remained anti-capitalist throughout her life.

Kahlo’s commitment was not symbolic or gestural. In 1937, she and Rivera offered sanctuary to Leon Trotsky and his wife Natalia Sedova, who were fleeing Stalin’s purges. The couple lived at the Casa Azul, Kahlo’s family home, in Coyoacán, for nearly two years under their protection. While she would later distance herself from Trotskyist politics, especially as Rivera shifted allegiances within the fractious Mexican left, her revolutionary convictions never wavered. In the final year of her life, despite declining health, she rejoined the Communist Party, attending meetings and public demonstrations while confined to a wheelchair.

Her art cannot be separated from this context. While often interpreted in bourgeois galleries as introspective or surreal, her self-portraits are radical expressions of identity forged in the crucible of revolution and pain. Her depiction of Indigenous dress, her explicit portrayals of bodily trauma, and her unwavering gaze were political statements against colonial aesthetics and Eurocentric standards of beauty. Kahlo refused to conform to the cultural prescriptions of femininity, nationalism, or modernism.

Yet In Her Own Image, like so many museum exhibitions, risks aestheticising Kahlo’s radical life into a consumable spectacle. Even as it offers intimate insight into her world, her lipstick shades, her medications, the plaster and steel corsets she wore to manage debilitating spinal injuries, it does so with minimal engagement with her explicitly communist politics. There is one brief video, quietly tucked away in a side gallery, that shows Kahlo with Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and Natalia Sedova. It is the only explicit mention of her Communist Party membership. While a hammer and sickle appears hand-painted on one of her plaster corsets, it is offered without context, an aesthetic flourish likely to be overlooked by most visitors unfamiliar with left symbolism.

There are scattered references to her being “political,” yet this framing is vague and depoliticised. The exhibition leaves Kahlo’s Marxism to inference, relying on the assumption that visitors will either not notice, or not care. Subtle clues abound for those who know what to look for, but these are not explained or framed as part of a revolutionary tradition. Instead, they sit as curious relics of an eccentric personality, easily subsumed into the consumer-friendly narrative of personal struggle and individual creativity.

This is not an incidental oversight. The cultural industry excels at detaching revolutionary figures from their politics in order to neutralise their potential for subversion. Che Guevara becomes a t-shirt; Angela Davis becomes a quote on a poster. Frida Kahlo becomes a logo. In this way, capitalism doesn’t merely ignore radicals. It metabolises them, hollowing out their ideological substance and selling the empty shell back to us at a profit.

The irony is sharp: the same system Kahlo denounced in her writing, painting, and political work now capitalises on her legacy. Her opposition to U.S. imperialism and bourgeois modernity is nowhere in the pop-up shops that accompany the exhibition. Instead, she is sold as an icon of self-expression, individual resilience, and aesthetic uniqueness, values which, stripped of their revolutionary content, are entirely compatible with the neoliberal order.

In conversations with friends, I found few knew about her membership in the Communist Party or the political dimensions of her relationship with Rivera and Trotsky. This is not surprising. Historical revisionism, particularly of revolutionary women, is not accidental, it is a structural feature of capitalist culture production.

Frida Kahlo’s legacy, like that of many revolutionary women, is complicated. We may not share all of her positions or alliances. Just as Alexandra Kollontai made her peace with the Stalinist bureaucracy and reneged on her earlier radically feminist ideas about the family, or Tithi Bhattacharya has voiced criticisms of the Cuban Revolution, political divergence does not erase revolutionary commitment. We can still learn from them, study their lives, their contradictions, and the historical forces that shaped their choices. Kahlo should be remembered not only as a queer, disabled, mestiza woman who challenged colonial and patriarchal norms, but as a militant internationalist who used her life and art to advance the cause of liberation.

In this moment of global crisis, where art institutions increasingly serve the rich and culture is weaponised against the poor, reclaiming Frida Kahlo as a comrade, not a brand, is a necessary act of political resistance.