The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, who died over fifty years ago, continues to enjoy popularity because of her uncommon artwork and lifestyle. She was a painter and lithographer, an artist in the traditional sense, but she was also what we now term a performance artist. Much of her creative work was performative; she used her body as a medium for expressing her political, social, and cultural ideologies. In most cases, her approach was considered non-traditional for a woman living in Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century: she was a Marxist, she experimented with lesbian relationships, she cross-dressed, and she was a woman who made a living as an artist. Her artwork reflected her unique life and follows the criteria for performance art in several ways. Performance art tends to focus on the actor rather than the text, and it emphasizes personal narratives (Taylor, “Opening Remarks” 11). It often seeks to destabilize traditional notions of “culture” and “art” as it subverts repressive, hierarchical, and patriarchal societies (Taylor, “Opening Remarks” 11). Kahlo expressed all of these traits in her life and work. As a result, Kahlo is one of the most popular iconic figures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Her iconicity consists of an unusual combination of customary religious motifs and innovative secular themes.

Kahlo's performative nature makes her an attractive character for the traditional stage as well. She appears as the protagonist in a great number of plays written especially in the last three decades. Dramatists and audiences alike have shown a renewed interest in Kahlo's life and artwork over recent decades. Her rediscovery can be traced to the publication in 1983 of the biography written by Hayden Herrera, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo. Until the early 1980s, Kahlo was mostly known only in Mexico and among a small international circle of artists and aficionados. Mario Vargas Llosa notes that the impact of Herrera's thick volume: