Frida Kahlo's garden to be re-imagined in N.Y.

NEW YORK - Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's native garden and studio will be re-imagined at the New York Botanical Garden in the spring.

The garden will use flowers and plants native to Mexico in the exhibition "Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life," which will open May 16 and run through Nov. 1.

The artist's first solo exhibition in New York City in more than 25 years will reflect the bright colors and textures of Kahlo's portraits and still lifes.

It will feature about a dozen original paintings and drawings highlighting her use of botanical imagery. Photos of Kahlo and her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, also will be shown.

The Enid A. Haupt Conservatory will be transformed into Kahlo's Blue House (Casa Azul) studio and garden outside Mexico City. It was decorated in traditional Mexican folk-art objects, Colonial-era art, native plants and religious ex-voto paintings that depict a tragedy or someone with a grave illness or injury.

Among the features at the botanical garden will be a lava rock path lined with flowers. There also will be a scale version of a pyramid at Casa Azul that was created to display pre-Columbian art collected by her husband, muralist Diego Rivera. It will be filled with traditional Mexican terra cotta pots.

The exhibition also will have a dozen of her original paintings and drawings on view at the nearby LuEsther T. Mertz Library's art gallery.

The exhibition "will provide an in-depth look at Kahlo's work and artistic environment and also celebrate the energy and sophistication of Mexican culture," said Gregory Long, president and CEO of the garden.

It will be curated by art historian and Mexican art specialist Adriana Zavala.

The garden did a similar recreation in 2012 of Claude Monet's flower and water gardens and home at Giverny in the north of France.