Diego & Frida in Detroit

FAIN: TD-253976-17

Women Make Movies, Inc. (New York, NY 10001-5059)
Grace Raso (Project Director: August 2016 to July 2024)

To support Diego & Frida in Detroit, a feature documentary exploring the life and art of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo during their time in 1930s Detroit, and the indelible impression they left on the cultural identity and political history of the city and its people. In Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals, he depicted Detroit’s working class, and its many races and ethnicities, on the rarefied walls of the city’s art museum—legitimizing their long-ignored cultural and historical contributions and defining Detroit’s cultural identity. Frida Kahlo faced some of her most challenging life events while living in Detroit, but through this adversity created some of her most critically acclaimed works of art and established a personal style that would define her work until the end life—changing the face of modern art along with it. Together, they brought the people of Detroit into a meaningful relationship with an art that was “theirs,” a legacy that has lasts to the present day.