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The impending dread we glean from “Girl With A Death Mask” is at odds with much of what we think we might know about the legendary Mexican artist. This seemed especially apparent last week, on the 64th anniversary of her death. Instead of honouring and remembering Kahlo’s true legacy — her politics, her feminism, her activism, her art — we further contributed to its erasure with the continued commercialization of the “selfie queen’s” image.

Photo by Nagoya City Art Museum

You probably know her for the unibrow (sported as a logo by white girls on their fall denim jackets) and her “narcissistic” self-portraits. But there is so much more: she was a disabled (by polio as a child), bisexual woman, who married Diego Rivera, but had affairs with Josephine Baker and Leon Trotsky. She loudly supported socialist movements, and yet, managed to become the first Hispanic woman to be featured on a U.S. postal stamp.

But while her life was grand, her legacy has gone in a distinctly different direction. Selma Holo, arts history professor and director of the Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, said that when Kahlo was finally able to emerge from under the shadow of her famed muralist husband Rivera, it took her on an unfortunate turn to fetishization. “In the fetishization, she also became commodified. With that being the case, you begin to see (things like) buttons with her unibrow.”

In the years since her death, Frida’s face has become less of a political symbol and more of a commercial one. “Frida Kahlo? Oh yeah, I have a t-shirt with her face on it from my trip to Cancún!” Frida’s contemporary relevance rings similarly to that of the Argentine Marxist doctor Che Guevara. Che’s profile on a poster, with facial features edited to nothing but enhanced shadows and minor detail, has gone from representing the stoic face of political revolution to just another part of Western pop culture — widely seen on the dorm walls of stoner college kids.