Frida Kahlo at the V&A
Friday Kahlo was an avant-garde surrealist and great lover of Mexican folk art and traditions. Yet careful attention to her mother country’s exceptional folk art traditions shows that surrealism is practically imbued in its culture, with angels, devils, skeletons and virgins living comfortably alongside the vernacular of a modern capitalist society. Never having undergone a protestant reformation nor a proletarian revolution, Mexico remains deeply enmeshed in a religious and agrarian imaginary from which it looks slightly askance at the break-neck speed of Western technological society. No matter how fast your internet speed or big your picture hat, underneath we are all skeletons! It is Milagros’s great pleasure to make the connections between Kahlo’s work and the folk art she celebrated more vivid to the V&A’s visitors.
Milagros – Where the Living and the Dead Go Shopping
Tom Bloom set up Milagros in 1991, importing Mexican folk art, glassware, tiles and ceramics to sell in his Queens Road café in Bristol. The business venture was inspired by his visit to Mexico the previous year when he fell in love with the flamboyant, eclectic beauty of its folk art and crafts. A shop would give visibility to these little known delights as well as help sustain the fragile network of makers he met on his travels. Tom met the textile designer Juliette Tuke in 1997 and they entered partnership together. That year the business moved to Columbia Rd, home to the colourful and rowdy East End flower market. A more complimentary setting you couldn’t find. The shop’s name, Milagros, means ‘miracle’ in Spanish and conjures the proximity of the Gods in daily Mexican life. But this toe-hold of Mexico on the streets of rainy London, filled with grimacing skulls, iridescent glazes, winking patterns and exotic carved chimeras can feel like a miracle of its own to the casual passer by.
