"Honestly Frida"

As the title of the PBS biography suggests, Frida Kahlo was not always honest about herself, because as an artist, she believed in serving a higher truth. View this list to journey into real and surreal worlds.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 10 Unit 1's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: What Is Cultural Identity, Ethnic Hash, Two Kinds, Honestly Frida, Legal Alien, By Any Other Name, HAPA, Where Worlds Collide, My Mother Pieced Quilts, Everyday Use, Two Ways to Belong in America, An Indian Father's Plea
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. render
    show in, or as in, a picture
    With slim sable brushes, Frida Kahlo painstakingly rendered her bold unibrow and mustache in dozens of self-portraits.
  2. incongruous
    lacking in harmony or compatibility or appropriateness
    If her glaring lie seems jarring and incongruous
  3. candor
    the quality of being honest and straightforward
    disturbing, even, in the face of her usual unabashed candor
  4. juxtaposed
    placed side by side often for comparison
    reflect for a moment on the juxtaposed images that characterize her paintings
  5. apparent
    clearly revealed to the mind or the senses or judgment
    Frida never allowed apparent facts--her own birth certificate, for instance--to get in the way of a higher truth
  6. inextricable
    incapable of being disentangled or untied
    the truth in this case being that she and modern Mexico were inextricably bound in both revolution and renaissance
  7. conventional
    unimaginative and conformist
    An understanding of Frida Kahlo, the person as well as the paintings, requires a setting aside of conventional thoughts
  8. paradoxical
    seemingly contradictory but nonetheless possibly true
    At the same time, paradoxically enough, it requires the context of history.
  9. surrealism
    an artistic movement using fantastic and incongruous images
    Although Frida's work, often fantastic and sometimes gory, has been described as surrealism, she once wrote that she never knew she was a surrealist "until Andre Breton came to Mexico and told me I was one."
  10. eschew
    avoid and stay away from deliberately
    However, Frida eschewed labels.
  11. enigmatic
    not clear to the understanding
    even in her most enigmatic and complex painting, "What the Water Gave Me," Frida is "down to earth"
  12. literal
    reflecting the essential or genuine character of something
    having depicted "real images in the most literal, straightforward way"
  13. inseparable
    not capable of being split
    Like much of Mexican art, Frida's paintings "interweave fact and fantasy as if the two were inseparable and equally real"
  14. frank
    characterized by directness in manner or speech
    "Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself"
  15. sincere
    open and genuine; not deceitful
    I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.
Created on Tue Oct 07 10:53:24 EDT 2014 (updated Wed Oct 08 18:16:50 EDT 2014)

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