Prompt 297. The Alchemy of Blood

& the writer Emily Rapp Black on knowing Frida

Hi friend,

I have exciting news today! After months of alluding to my joint art exhibition with my mom, Anne Francey, I‘m thrilled to officially announce it: “The Alchemy of Blood” opens at ArtYard in Frenchtown, New Jersey, on June 22, 2024. If you read the description of the show you’ll see overlapping themes, in that both our works meditate on bodily agency, protective talismans, and emblems of the otherworldly that guided us through periods of metamorphosis.

However, maybe because I’m a writer first, I can't help but see a narrative arc in the body of work we’re sharing. It begins with my mom’s huge, abstract paintings of flowers and other biological forms she made while she was pregnant with me—as she meditated on incipient life, as she grappled with uncertainty around motherhood and her identity as an artist. After that comes the shields she made a decade ago, during my first bout with leukemia, when she confronted the opposite, unthinkable reality, that breach of contract with the natural order—that you may lose your child.

Continuing on, there’s a video installation piece we made together in the summer of 2021, only months before I learned of my relapse. It’s a short film where, on a sunny, breezy day in a picturesque old graveyard, I wrestle with my medical bills, studying them, laying them end to end, chasing after them as they’re scattered by the wind—teasing out the nuances between the price, the worth, and the value of a life. The narrative arc culminates in the works we both began making that following winter when I reentered treatment, as I took up watercolors and began painting my hospital fever dreams and the animal guides that appeared in them, as my mom began weaving a new series of shields from hospital bracelets, the ephemera of our liminal existence.

The narrative thread through these stages is how we turned to art in the face of great uncertainty—not necessarily to find an answer to it, but to embrace the unknown, even to rejoice in it, and ultimately to alchemize it. Of course, I didn’t see that arc back then. I could only see the questions: how to carry on after my life had imploded, how to fill my days when I was stuck in a bed, how to keep going when what I had relied on before—writing—was not available to me.

But in retrospect, this show feels inevitable. I look back on all those questions, fears, and doubts, and I think, “Oh, this is where it was all leading.” There's a kind of poetic logic, as if we’re always gathering threads, and weaving them into a tapestry whether we realize it or not.

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. “Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life.”  That’s what my mom has always modeled—arranging the pieces as a way to make sense of the uncertainties of your life, maybe even to save your life. 

I often say my mother is my greatest teacher. From a family of industrious worker bees, she is determined and driven, but she’s also curious and playful. No matter what she pursues, she chooses the most beautiful and interesting path possible. I’m so grateful to her for providing this example. I’m also grateful for the other gifts she has given me—a love of music, a love of gardens, and a love of the work of artists like Frida Kahlo. She gave me a copy of Frida’s illustrated diary when I first got sick, and it taught me so much—about pushing deeper into the broken places, transforming your relationship to whatever it is that’s plaguing you, through art. It’s clear, reading the diary, that painting did not take away Frida’s pain, physically or otherwise. But through the vehicle of creativity, she could travel beyond her confinement and her limitations. Anything becomes possible on the canvas or the page.

Not long ago, I visited my local bookstore and grabbed a few volumes to keep with me at my painting residency. One was a memoir called Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by the brilliant Emily Rapp Black, where she writes with such nuance about how her own disability led her to connect deeply with Frida’s life and work, and about the joy and grief of motherhood. (The mother of two, Emily's son Ronan died of Tay-Sachs disease just before his third birthday). She also writes with vivid clarity about visiting Frida’s home, Casa Azul, for the first time—seeing the courtyard where she kept her menagerie of xolos and birds and baby deer, and the rooms she filled with objets d’art, and the bed where she lay and painted—where she alchemized her pain on the canvas. Reading this gorgeous scene allowed me not only to revisit Frida’s home, but to interrogate how, like my mom, Frida showed me the alchemical power of art.

Today, with Emily’s permission, I’m honored to share an excerpt of the scene at Casa Azul. May it transport you and also help you celebrate an artist who has done the same for you.

Sending love,

Suleika

A preview of two of the works that we’ll be showing

Join me at “The Alchemy of Blood” exhibition

There will be an opening reception on Saturday, June 22. The following day, Sunday, June 23, there will be an artist talk with my mother Anne Francey and me, moderated by our beloved Carmen Radley. 

There is limited capacity for both of these events; you can reserve tickets here and here. But not to worry if you can’t make it opening weekend—the show will be up for three months!

Prompt 297. I Know Frida by Emily Rapp Black

The Casa Azul is on Londres Street in Coyoacan, which brims with ambient noise that is dignified and regal by virtue of its sheer magnitude and constancy. I am sitting now on the bench in the garden. Listening as the chime in the basilica marks the hours. Barking dogs patrol rooftops while others nose through bags of garbage piled between the street and the sidewalk. The knife-sharpener winds up and down the street, advertising his skill. Someone whistles while shaking out a heavy carpet beneath a blue tarpaulin. Sirens interrupt the sound of high heels striking pavement and cobblestones, followed by the almost funereal sound of a few half-hearted trumpet trills signaling the start of a jubilant parade. A Mariachi singer fastens and swings on a single note. The odor of frying food floats through the air like fog, like smoke, like a bad mood. Somewhere the sound of hammering lifts from unseen labor. No wonder Frida loved this enclosed space in the middle of the movement around her, especially when she was confined to her bed.

Here, in Casa Azul’s fragrant garden, families mingle and snap photographs, speaking to one another in languages I recognize and others that I do not. A man sweeps the clean sidewalk with a wiry broom and a tall dustpan. Walking around the garden, I feel my baby kick. The new shape moves inside the always shifting shape. Trickster love, trickster artist, trickster friend, trickster mother, trickster child. I love the one body inside the body I try to love. Can Frida teach me this magic trick?

Each night the body is reshaped with the removal of the prosthetic, placed next to the bed within easy reach, and each morning refashioned through the act of reattachment. Each day this rebirth. But the girl’s body in my belly is sturdy, active and—I hope, as I do not believe in prayer—perfect. If she is, the world will still be unsafe for her, but without this symmetry, a kind of perfection, it will hold within it a danger and power that I am just coming to realize in the first few years of middle age.

This girl inside me growing hair and fingernails, building organs and the passageways between them, is swimming in the remnant soup of my son’s faulty DNA, the freakish and delicate twining that rotted his brain and killed him. At night, and sometimes during the day, I track the living, hidden baby in her domain where my heartbeats write the score of her first recognizable music. Her hands and feet across the surface of my domed belly are like momentary flashes against the skin, prints of possibility, the tiny star of a hand appearing and then disappearing, here but not yet. Last night, I underlined this line in Rebecca Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby: “To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story.” We are inside Frida’s home, inside her story, her art, her world. Or are we?

I know Frida, I want to say to the people I watch emerging from the house, having looked at her bed and her empty wheelchair positioned in front of the canvas, as if waiting for her to arrive. I know her, and you do not. I am the secret friend of her long-ago dreams. She is waiting for me. 

This is, of course, a fantasy. I might understand Frida least of all because I assume that I do, and therefore my lens is cloudy with the not-knowing of thinking that I know. It is a puzzle that can only ever be partially solved, for how could I possibly know her? Hegel might ask “how do we know that we know what we believe we know?” The answer is: we do not. And this is why poetry, why art.

Your prompt for the week:

Write about an artist—someone you think you know, someone who feels like a friend.

If you’d like, you can post your response to today’s prompt in the comments section, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals. As a reminder, we love seeing your work inspired by the Isolation Journals, but to preserve this as a community space, we request no promotion of outside projects.

Today’s Contributor—

Emily Rapp Black is the author of Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World. A former Fulbright scholar, she was educated at Harvard University, Trinity College-Dublin, Saint Olaf College, and the University of Texas-Austin, where she was a James A. Michener Fellow. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has received awards and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is currently Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside. She is the mother of two children: Ronan (2010-2013) and Charlotte.

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