Frida: The Making of an Icon. Milagros & Tate Modern: Frida — The Making of an Icon
Milagros is honoured to be collaborating with Tate Modern to provide merchandise for the exhibition Frida: The Making of an Icon, supplying handcrafted objects made in small workshops across Mexico.
Tate Commerce placed its orders largely on the strength of the work it had seen at Milagros on Columbia Road. To source the collection, Tom and Emile travelled across Mexico for six weeks in the spring, visiting makers we have worked with for decades while also seeking out new artisans and workshops.
Mexican Folk Art, Frida Kahlo and Mexicanidad
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were avid collectors of Mexican folk art and pre-Columbian artefacts. Much of Mexico’s distinctive visual culture emerged from the syncretism between Spanish Catholicism and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican beliefs.
Over the past five centuries, these traditions have combined to create the rich and highly individual visual language evident in the work of artists such as Kahlo and Rivera, helping to shape modern ideas of Mexican identity and mexicanidad.
Many of the craft skills, materials and aesthetic traditions found in Mexican folk art today can be traced back through centuries of cultural exchange and continuity.
Contemporary Mexican Craft for Tate Modern
The objects sourced by Milagros for Tate Modern reflect this same cultural dialogue. Their forms, materials and symbolism draw on both Indigenous and European traditions, while expressing a distinctly Mexican visual identity.
Through the collection, visitors to Frida: The Making of an Icon can engage not only with Kahlo’s work, but also with contemporary Mexican craft made by artisans whose work continues to express the country’s rich cultural heritage.
