'The people's artist': Two weeks left to see Frida Kahlo exhibit at College of DuPage
In terms of sheer magnitude, the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the College of DuPage has sold more than 88,000 tickets with two weeks left until the show ends its three-month run.
That audience is larger than a full-capacity crowd at Soldier Field or Pitchfork Music Festival.
But a world map displayed in the lobby of the exhibition puts those ticket numbers - and Kahlo's allure - into perspective.
A few weeks after the retrospective opened in June and made the Glen Ellyn community college an unlikely magnet for legions of Frida fans, Diana Martinez, the director of the college's McAninch Arts Center, started asking visitors to put a dot on the map to show where they were from and how far they had traveled to take in "Frida Kahlo: Timeless."
Glance at the map now, and you'll see ticket holders made the trek from Texas, Brazil, the U.K. and beyond. Dots are plastered all over Latin America and Europe. A few are stuck on Iceland and South Africa.
In all, the exhibition of the Mexican artist's work has attracted patrons from 50 U.S. states and 43 countries.
Even with the uncertainties of the pandemic, the college was expecting to host between 75,000 and 100,000 visitors.
Attendance for "Timeless" - recently extended an extra week to run through Sept. 12 - will likely land closer to the higher end of those estimates, Martinez said. The exhibition has averaged about 5,000 tickets a week.
"We're going to be right there," Martinez said.
"Timeless" displays 26 original Kahlo works on loan from Mexico's Museo Dolores Olmedo in Xochimilco. The rest of the exhibition is devoted to an evocative biography of Kahlo, illuminating her Mexicanidad and revolutionary politics, her disabilities and her chronic pain, the result of a bus crash that nearly took her life in 1925.
"She is the people's artist," Martinez said.
And as such, Martinez and museum curators sought to reach an inclusive audience. They invited local artists to contribute reproductions of Kahlo's medical corsets and her bed. Scholars and leaders of cultural institutions gave virtual lectures. A children's area gave a family-friendly interpretation of Kahlo's unflinching self-portraits.
A busload of kids from West Chicago have since visited "Timeless." Martinez gave tours to Purdue University students in Latin American Studies and LGBTQ campus organizations.
"We collaborated with people from the National Mexican Museum of Art in Chicago and the Merchandise Mart to West Chicago's Mexican Cultural Center to the Mexican consulate," Martinez said.
Earlier this month, the DuPage County Convention & Visitors Bureau estimated "Timeless" patrons from Illinois infused $8 million into the local economy, with another $2 million generated from spending by out-of-state and international visitors. Ticket sales alone have grossed nearly $2 million to date.
Tourism officials will have final economic impact numbers later this fall, but they say the summerlong exhibition, delayed a year due to the pandemic, exceeded expectations.
"I think we were all really nervous for it to go on, but you know what, it kind of fell into this really great window," said Beth Marchetti, the bureau's executive director. "It really gave a lot of our hospitality partners a lot of hope."
The college had never before landed an international art show. And more than 40 years had elapsed since Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art presented a Kahlo exhibition of similar scale in 1978.
"'At the end of the day, we can do much more than we think we can,'" said Martinez, referencing a Kahlo saying. "And it's true. And I think this proved it."