CONKLIN: A couple of years ago I was at an American Public Garden conference meeting
and one of my colleagues, Karen Daubmann, who's the vice president of exhibition
for the New York Botanical Garden mentioned to me that they were awaiting to hear
about a grant award and I said about what?
What kind of grant?
And she said well, we're going to mount a Frida Kahlo exhibit, and the minute I heard
that I thought: Tucson needs this.
DAUBMANN: We hosted the exhibition May to October 2015 and we had been working
on it for 3 or 4 years in advance.
We typically do several flower shows each year and we have a 250 acre garden
so the venues are spread out, and we were able to secure a National Endowment
for the Humanities grant but in order to get that they really want the work that you put
into an exhibition to live on and so we immediately started looking for partners,
and the Tucson Botanical Garden seemed to be a perfect fit.
CONKLIN: And I thought, I don't know how we're going to do this,
but she said so what parts of this exhibit do you want?
And I said I want everything except the artwork we couldn't accept and a few historical items.
I said just pack it all up and ship it, we'll get it shipped,
and Pima Community College was able to recreate it and rebuild it and it has just been a labor
of love of the entire community partnering to make sure this happens.
[music plays] WOMEN: [in unison] Hi!
GROUP: [in unison] Ready, two, three!
[separately] There we go!
It's open!
ALBARRAN: This is not only a celebration of Frida Kahlo as a Mexican, it's a celebration
of Frida Kahlo as a universal human being, and more than that the celebration
of the Mexican community that is working in the US, in Arizona,
and in Tucson, so this is a great location.
MERRYMAN: Oh I think it's wonderful.
It's the colors, the vibrancy, the blue, and the marigolds, the bright orange,
and it's just so creative it's fun.
PASK: The Casa Azul is outside of Mexico City so we in New York - it was an internal exhibition
with some outside aspects and then a gallery and poetry walk, so then translating
that to Tucson was very exciting when I got the phone call that this was going to happen,
and you know, what I call my hometown, and I grew up in Yuma but spent a lot of time
in Tucson, went to school here, so when the New York Botanical Garden called me and said
that this was happening they knew I was gonna be ecstatic about it -
is the way that I remember it in Mexico City originally, open to the sky.
DAUBMANN: This is amazing and I'm thrilled to see all of the love and creation
that the New York Botanical Garden put into this exhibition living a longer life here in Tucson.
FOLEY: I'm really interested in native plants and in gardens and I was very curious
to see how they would - what her garden looked like.
I think that the botanical gardens was very lucky to get this exhibit.
I read that it's only one of two in the whole country, so this is a real coup for the gardens.
DRAPER: It's gorgeous and it is quite an insight into her life and what she's all
about which I didn't know too much about, so it's enlightening.
SASSE: Well she's really the epitome of the cult of personality.
What made her special was not only her surrealist works that were very personal
and quite challenging, but also her own style.
She melded the idea of European modernism with Mexican indigenous culture,
so a lot of her imagery comes from that kind of sensibility and certainly her dress,
but then later the contemporary folk artists have been influenced by her.
So you'll see a lot of Chicano artists or folk artists emulating how she looked.
For instance, we have this wonderful piece by Josefina Aguilar who was a Oaxaca folk artist,
and in our collection we have a double-headed Frida and again, it's sort of putting her
on this special cult celebrity status and putting her on a pedestal for being kind
of a champion of the folk artists from Mexico.
And then we have another artist, David Tineo, who is a well-known Chicano artist
and mural artist from this area and he's often painted her image.
And then I think when you go to see the festivities around Dia de Los Muertos,
a lot of people will dress up as Frida, so she's become almost as much of an icon as the Virgin
of Guadalupe because it's such a recognizable image.
CONKLIN: We hope that people feel that same inspiration when they come here and they read
about Frida Kahlo and how nature inspired her to do the work she did.
I also hope that, you know, it's difficult sometimes you always
as a botanical garden director have to figure out ways to inspire people
to become environmentalists, to become gardeners, to become appreciators of nature
who might not otherwise walk into our doors, so this just gives us another opportunity
to make a connection with someone who might not be a botanical garden aficionado
or even an appreciator and show them all that we have to offer,
which is much more than even Frida Kahlo.
There's a lot of many components in this wonderful urban garden in the middle of Tucson.