The Wounded Deer Keeps Running

Lately I’ve been drawn to opera, for reasons I hadn’t been able to fully articulate until Frida Kahlo unleashed her anguish in an aria defying the goddess of the underworld. Frida (mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack) keens in minor key, her voice climbing towards the catwalk: “For me the world was torture—wounds, anguish, wires, thorns, needles, the pain, agony.” Agonía, she howls, and the chorus adds their voices, agonía. If language alone diminishes pain, music catalyzes it. The aria unleashed something in me: here, pain is not a metaphor. It is not (primarily) psychological. It has an embodied, material quality.

Kahlo’s self portraits, especially those depicting her pain and illness, mesmerize me. But I went into El último sueño de Frida y Diego, an opera composed by Gabriela Lena Frank with libretto by Nilo Cruz, unsure which Frida I’d encounter. Frida Kahlo, after all, is a girlboss. Or rather—she’s been girlbossified: transmogrified, like a late-capitalist saint, into an ahistorical queer feminist icon. Hyperpoliticized and depoliticized, hypersexualized and desexualized, it’s hard to name a more overdetermined figure.

Fridamania, which took off in earnest in the 1980s, thirty years after the painter’s death, bears no real relationship with Kahlo herself, nor anything but the most tenuous connection to her oeuvre or even her biography. The casual viewer wearing her face as a t-shirt, tote bag, or novelty socks might know that Kahlo survived childhood polio, and later a horrific bus accident in Mexico City when she was a teenager. A metal rod impaled her through the stomach, and though she miraculously survived, it derailed her life. The accident and her tempestuous marriage to muralist Diego Rivera (and the affairs she had with both men and women) loom large in the popular imagination. Art critics and historians critique Fridamania as valorizing her accident, her marriage, and even her radical political ideology at the expense of her work and its context.

El último sueño de Frida y Diego embraces the mythologizing of Kahlo, telling a magical realist story of the lovers’ reunion three years after Frida’s untimely death. As the curtain rises, villagers swarm the local cemetery with offerings for their dead. (Frank, who received the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in music, has a longstanding interest in indigenous Latin American music traditions. In El último sueño, she incorporates indigenous instruments and Mexican folkloric melodies and rhythms, channeling the syncretism of the Day of the Dead.)

Diego Rivera (baritone Alfredo Daza), dazed and grief-stricken, makes his way to Frida’s grave. At the Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Lorena Maza, the set (designed by Jorge Ballina) evokes an Aztec pyramid as Diego traverses the candlelit tombstones and ofrendas to Frida’s memorial at the pyramid’s apex. After he leaves, an old crone peddling flowers metamorphoses into Catrina, the Keeper of Souls (soprano Ana María Martínez). In Mictlán, the Aztec underworld, Catrina commands Frida to spectrally return to her husband for the 24 hours of Día de Muertos, but Frida initially refuses to return to the pain of her life.

The girlbossification of Kahlo transforms her disability into inspirational pablum, inventing a neat dramatic arc for her life while simultaneously privileging images that obscure her physical suffering. (Her most ubiquitous images, like those with her pet monkeys, hide visible manifestations of her illness.) It becomes a boon, if not for her, then for us, her insatiable consumers. It fueled her painting, which she undertook as a means to cope with her pain while she recovered. Her suffering, by that logic, was worth it.

Except that logic is bullshit, and the opera knows it.

It’s striking that the opera’s composer, Frank was born partially deaf, and she too invites her disability into her artistic process. As she writes in the New York Times: “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.”

Her invocation of dream logic mirrors Kahlo’s surrealist visions of herself, which frequently entangle her body with the natural world. It’s also a testament to how disability can engender wildly creative ways of being. When the world doesn’t conform itself to your body, you are compelled to find new ways of shaping the world. This may seem like a girlboss move, but in reality, it’s the antithesis of everything the girlboss stands for: an unthreatening image of feminized power.

To the contrary, the opera is rife with ungovernable female power, especially in Catrina, the embodiment of Death. She transfixes in a gold and black gown (designed by Eloise Kazan) with a corset covered in an exoskeleton of ribs and vertebrae and skirt bedecked in the sinuous skeletons of snakes, a reference to the Aztec goddess Cōātlīcue. Catrina dominates Mictlán, a kingdom with its own thrumming vibrancy, depicted not in Hadean greyscale but glorious Sonoran ochre. The opera unsettles one of the most insidious tropes of disability narratives: that the disabled person is better off dead. Instead, the narrative—and the orchestra—ripples with tension and ambiguity: Frida may want to remain in the underworld, but it isn’t the torturous dungeon of Western myth. It’s also a permeable space, as spirits move between the dead and living. Reluctant though she may be to return to a world full of pain and visit her wayward husband, she desperately wants to return to her art.

The pop culture narrative about Kahlo is that she used her painting to make meaning of her accident, and the lifelong pain she suffered as a result. (Or even that she cultivated her pain and illness to make art and to get Rivera’s attention.) But that’s not what I see in her canvases. I see an artist ambivalent about the task of transmuting her pain into something beautiful. It’s probable that I’m projecting. Like Shakespeare’s plays, Kahlo’s paintings serve as a Rorschach test for whatever the spectator wants to see; it’s part of their genius. (Her paintings are astronomically valuable, in part because of their rarity on the art market since the Mexican government declared them artistic monuments in 1984. Last November, a self-portrait called El sueño (La cama) of Kahlo—encircled with vines and sleeping on a bunk bed while a skeleton occupies the top bunk—sold for an eye-watering $55 million.)

The aestheticization of pain is complex. As artists, it’s arguably our job to render our experiences beautiful. To make meaning out of suffering. (Or inflict suffering, but that’s another aesthetic category altogether.) Kahlo’s paintings, the ones about her illnesses, are transfixing, but they’re unnerving more than lovely. For example, her 1946 painting The Wounded Deer, recently on display at the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibit on Frida Kahlo in Paris, is a tiny canvas which depicts her antlered head on the body of a stag pierced with nine separate arrows. Yet the deer runs through the woods, not yet felled by its fate. The viewer is placed in the role of the hunter. As an artist whose life has been reconfigured by chronic illness, I recognize that creature—animal and artist—bloodied, exhausted, still working, and I recognize myself as predator, creator and commodifier of the work.

Pain is not a vehicle for making great art, even at its most operatic.

It just fucking hurts.

Of course, pain is art’s atomic matter dating back at least to Greek tragedy. But generally this means psychological, not physical agony. One might argue that the boundary between the two, especially in art, is fluid. I can’t deny pain’s primacy, even as I resist (resent?) it. Even as it suffuses my own artistic process and practice. Frida experiences the same vacillation in Catrina’s presence.

El último sueño de Frida y Diego is irrefutably beautiful, and I would not wish it otherwise. Frida capitulates to Catrina’s demand and returns to the land of the living, rendered in majorelle blue—the color of her home, La Casa Azul. Uninspired, Diego is attempting to work on a mural when she returns. It’s noteworthy that he’s the only one who can paint onstage. As a spirit, Frida cannot see her own image, and therefore cannot paint her primary subject, herself. Her reunion with Diego is imbued with Orphean yearning. After all, they can’t touch each other. But inevitably, they can’t resist embracing, and Frida’s pain once again engulfs her. By then, it’s too late to paint, as she must return to Mictlán. Inverting the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Diego follows her.

Ultimately the opera can’t escape the inextricability of pain and beauty. Neither could Kahlo. (Neither can I.)

The girlbossification of Frida is, by extension, the girlbossification of pain: the repackaging of pain as something profitable. But I’m not interested in commodifying my pain. I’m interested in what Kahlo did, what Frank and Cruz do: make legible the contradictory, contingent choices disabled and chronically ill artists make. We are not making our suffering palatable for you. We are defying the Keeper of the Dead.