Cristina Kahlo on What People Get Wrong About Her Great-Aunt Frida

The TIME Studios doc Frida is on the 2025 Oscars shortlist for best documentary film.

The innovative movie, available to stream on Amazon Prime, is hailed as the first documentary to be entirely told through the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’s own words. Director Carla Gutierrez and her team feature Kahlo’s letters on men, politics, feminism, and Fernanda Echevarría Del Rivero voices her personal diary entries. Animation brings the artist’s iconic paintings to life.

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One of Frida’s credited consultants is Kahlo’s great-niece, Cristina Kahlo, 64, who is an artist in her own right. A photographer for 35 years, she has documented many different subjects, such as Mexican cultural institutions, danzón dancer communities, and children with disabilities.

Kahlo is named after Frida Kahlo’s sister, who famously had an affair with Frida’s husband, the artist Diego Rivera and posed for his artwork. The affair has not clouded the work of Cristina the photographer. In fact, she once collaborated with Diego Rivera’s grandson.

Most of what she learned about Frida came from research later on in life, and when she is not behind the camera, she is doing interviews about Frida and helping curate exhibits about her great-aunt. In the below conversation, she talks about what it’s like to work under the Kahlo name, myths and misconceptions about her great-aunt Frida, and reflects on Frida’s legacy.

Growing up, what did you learn about your namesake Cristina Kahlo and her relationship with Diego Rivera?

My father Antonio passed away when I was 13 years old. I was really young, so we didn’t have much time to talk about the family. When my father passed away, I started reading about Frida Kahlo and learned that her sister Cristina had an affair with Diego Rivera.

How did you feel when you read about that?

Well, it’s complicated. Frida and Diego were very sexually open, and he was a smooth-talker. He was always telling women that they are so beautiful. I think it was very easy for Cristina to feel attracted to Diego Rivera. And at the same time, Frida Kahlo had her own lovers. You never know what really happened.

How did the affair affect Frida and Cristina’s relationship as sisters?

Frida and Cristina were apart for about one year, and then Frida forgave Cristina. Of all of Frida’s sisters, she was closest to Cristina. When Frida traveled to New York, Cristina was with her. When Frida was sick, Cristina took care of her. 

How did Cristina and Diego’s relationship affect you?

I was in the same school with Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, who is Diego Rivera’s grandson, and we talked about that. He said while we are not family, we are historically related. We became friends, and in the 1980s, we had an art gallery—one of the first art galleries in Mexico focused on photography.

What are your favorite Frida paintings?

Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926) and Self Portrait with Necklace (1933), when she started to see herself as a subject for doing paintings. They are very simple, before she started to paint flowers in hair and monkeys.

I love the symbolism in My Dress Hangs There (1933). She was in the United States, but she wanted to be in Mexico. The hanging dress is like saying, ‘my dress is here, but I am in another place.’

What do people get wrong about Frida?

Sometimes people know the face of Frida Kahlo as a character, but they really do not know anything about her, as someone who has suffered her whole life. 

Yes, in fact, one of the exhibits you curated in recent years was “Kahlo Without Borders” for the MSU Broad Art Museum in Michigan, in which you photographed her medical records.

I made an installation with the files of different surgeries, the medical files of the doctors, and the many medicines she has to take. That exhibition was important for showing Frida as human. Frida has become kind of a pop character, and it’s important to show her as a real person.

It’s a really good point you’re making about trying to show the human side of Frida, and now the TIME Studios documentary Frida is trying to do the same, by telling Frida’s story in her own words.

One thing that I like very much about the film Frida is that the filmmakers use real photographs of her and her letters and writings, so she is the one talking, as opposed to the many people who write about her in a novel.

How do you see Frida Kahlo’s legacy today?

I travel a lot because of my work, and everyone knows who she was. She has become a kind of ambassador of Mexico. That makes you curious about a country, about Mexico, about popular art, about Oaxaca, and I think that’s good for Mexico.

What do people get wrong about Frida?

The problem is that she has become a business. She has become so popular and well-known everywhere that the face of Frida Kahlo is now on many products which don’t have anything to do with her personality or with her political ideas or with her personal ideas. I think she would really hate the Frida Barbie doll because it’s expensive, and not everybody can have one.

People arrive at my house dressed like Frida Kahlo, with some outfit from Oaxaca and flowers in their hair and things like that. There are a lot of contests—like Frida look alike contests—and that’s not the correct way of understanding the lessons that she left us. 

What are those lessons?

You have to look for your own personality. You have to talk about the things you like, and dress the way you like to dress, but not copy another person. Frida’s husband Diego Rivera was very, very well-known as an artist in Mexico, and yet she had her own style as a painter and her own subjects. What we have to learn from Frida Kahlo is to be authentic, to be yourself.