Tuba City High Spanish Club plays host to Frida Kahlo exhibit
Students and teacher prepare for annual trip to Spain

A packed house of students, teachers and community members listen to an acoustic guitar performance during a Frida Kahlo evening at Tuba City High School. Photo/Rosanda Suetopka Thayer

A packed house of students, teachers and community members listen to an acoustic guitar performance during a Frida Kahlo evening at Tuba City High School. Photo/Rosanda Suetopka Thayer

TUBA CITY, Ariz. - Teresa Maria Orman, longtime Tuba City High School Spanish teacher and Tuba City and Moencopi community member, played host to a Nov. 13 public exhibition of the paintings and autobiographical film of Mexican born artist, Frida Kahlo. She put on the event to support her students' interest in the art, food, language and cultures of Spain and Mexico.

The event took place in the lobby of the math and science building at Tuba City High School.

Orman said she looks forward each year to preparing her students for their annual trip to Spain to visit historic Spanish sites and use the conversational Spanish her students learn in her classroom.

Kahlo was a Mexican and Jewish artist born in 1907. She died in 1954 at 47 years of age.

Art historians and museum administrators have said Kahlo was one of the most important 20th century painters and one of the few Latin American artists to achieve a global art reputation. In 1983, Kahlo's work was declared the "property of the Mexican state."

Kahlo was one of several daughters of a German Jewish photographer father. Her mother was of Mexican Indian heritage.

After a bus trolley accident that smashed her spinal column and fractured her pelvis, Kahlo began to sketch and paint while confined to her bed. Then at age 21, Kahlo married Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

It is the emotion and attention to detail in Kahlo's work that Orman thought would show some of the flamboyant and cultural richness of Latin culture.

It was a crowded evening, with students, parents and community visitors admiring the printed reproductions and enjoying live acoustic guitar music. Snacks and appetizers from another culture helped to set the mood and tone.

Orman's students baked several Mexican, Spanish and Cuban dessert foods for the event including pan espanol, a light buttery Mexican brown sugar sweet bread, coconut rice pudding from Cuba and polvarones, a light sugar cookie.

The evening also included a 90-minute PBS film about Kahlo and guitar performances from local Hopi and Navajo acoustic guitarists.

The first was former Tuba City High School music teacher Blair Quamahongnewa. Tiffany Tohannie, a Tuba City High school graduate, played second.

Orman's Spanish Club students built art exhibition style free standing triangular platforms to hang huge, colorful prints of Kahlo's work, which the students placed along several of the walls in the area sectioned off for the exhibit. Visitors could also watch a PowerPoint virtual tour of Kahlo's home in Mexico.

Each of the prints was accompanied by text briefly describing the meaning of each painting. Orman said she felt it was important to show the lineal artistic progression in Kahlo's art career as each step of Kahlo's own life moved toward its finality.

On the trip to Spain, Orman requires her students to speak in Spanish on their flights and during their stay making the experience much more meaningful.

The students will share what they learned on the trip to Spain during a presentation to the school board during the spring semester.

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