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ACTIVITY 1.6 continued
6 As students are reading, monitor their progress. Be sure they are engaged with the text and annotating key ideas and details about Kahlo’s cultural identity. Evaluate whether the selected reading mode is effective.
34 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 10
34 SpringBoard® English Language Arts Grade 10 SCAFFOLDING THE TEXT-DEPENDENT QUESTIONS
Kahlo’s personality? Look at paragraphs 2 and 3. Think of what you have already learned about Kahlo’s personality and character. Then look at the phrases that follow the word alegria.
3. Craft and Structure: (RI.9–10.6) Choose a line of text that best characterizes the author’s opinion of Kahlo’s art. What are some words the author uses to describe Kahlo’s art? Which words relate to the writer’s own connections to the art?
1. Key Ideas and Details: (RI.9–10.1) Based 9781457304668_TCB_SE_G10_U1_B1.indd 34
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on details in paragraph 1, what inference can you make about Frida Kahlo’s character and personality? What details does the text provide about her bed decor and how she looked and presented herself that can help you make an informed inference?
2. Craft and Structure: (RI.9–10.4) Using context clues from paragraphs 2 and 3, determine the meaning of the word alegria as it applies to
ACTIVITY 1.6
continued
Two Perspectives on Cultural Identity
encapsulates: sums up gallantry: courage
haute couture: high fashion; expensive and fashionable clothing
transmuted: transformed tempered: made less severe
rhetoric: language
My Notes
The occasion encapsulates as much as it culminates this extraordinary woman’s career. It testifies, in fact, to many of the qualities that marked Kahlo as a person and as a painter: her gallantry and indomitable alegria in the face of physical suffering; her insistence on surprise and specificity; her peculiar love of spectacle as a mask
to preserve privacy and personal dignity. Above all, the opening of her exhibition dramatized Frida Kahlo’s central subject—herself. Most of the some two hundred paintings she produced in her abbreviated career were self-portraits. . . .
She dressed in flamboyant clothes, greatly preferring floor-length native Mexican costumes to haute couture. Wherever she went she caused a sensation. One New Yorker remembers that children used to follow her in the streets. “Where’s the circus?” they would ask; Frida Kahlo did not mind a bit. . . . Frida flaunted her alegria the way a peacock spreads its tail, but it camouflaged a deep sadness and inwardness, even self- obsession.
“I paint my own reality,” she said. “The only thing I know is that I paint because
I need to, and I paint always whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration.” What passed through Frida Kahlo’s head and into her art was some
of the most original and dramatic imagery of the twentieth century. Painting herself bleeding, weeping, cracked open, she transmuted her pain into art with remarkable frankness tempered by humor and fantasy. Always specific and personal, deep-probing rather than comprehensive in scope, Frida’s autobiography in paint has peculiar intensity and strength—a strength that can hold the viewer in an uncomfortably tight grip.
The majority of her paintings are small—twelve by fifteen inches is not unusual; their scale suits the intimacy of her subject matter. With very small sable brushes, which she kept immaculately clean, she would carefully lay down delicate strokes of color, bringing the image into precise focus, making fantasy persuasive through the rhetoric of realism. . . .
In the fall of 1977, the Mexican government turned over the largest and most prestigious galleries in the Palace of Fine Arts to a retrospective exhibition of Frida Kahlo’s works. It was a strange sort of homage, for it seemed to celebrate the exotic personality and story of the artist rather more than it honored her art. The grand, high- ceilinged rooms were dominated by huge blow-up photographs of incidents in Frida’s life, which made the jewel-like paintings look almost like punctuation points.
The art—the legend Frida herself had created—won out in the end, however. Because her paintings were so tiny in relation to the photographs and to the exhibition space, the spectator had to stand within a few feet of each one to focus on it at all.
And at that proximity their strange magnetism exerted its pull. Taken from separate, poignant moments in her life, each was like a smothered cry, a nugget of emotion so dense that one felt it might explode. . . .
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
© 2017 College Board. All rights reserved.
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