On July 6, 1907, Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo Calderón was born in Coyoacán, Mexico — though she later claimed 1910, the year of the Mexican Revolution, preferring to be born from the rupture.

At six she contracted polio, which left her right leg thinner than her left. At eighteen she was in a bus accident that broke her spine in three places, her collarbone, her right leg in eleven places, and her pelvis. A steel handrail passed through her hip and out through her vagina. She was in a full-body cast for three months. She had thirty-five surgeries over the course of her lifetime.

She began painting in her cast. She had a mirror installed in the canopy above her bed. She painted herself — not as a victim but as a witness. Her 1944 The Broken Column shows her spinal column replaced with a crumbling Ionic pillar, her body pierced with nails, a medical corset the only thing holding her together. She painted it looking straight out at the viewer.

The European surrealists claimed her. She rejected the label: "They thought I was a surrealist, but I was not. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality."

She died in 1954. Her diary's last entry read: "I joyfully await the exit — and I hope never to return."