My Dress Hangs There

My Dress Hangs There (Allá cuelga mi vestido) is a 1933 oil-and-collage painting on masonite by the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, measuring 45.7 by 49.5 cm, held by the Hoover Gallery in San Francisco.

Kahlo began it during the couple's stay in New York, where Diego Rivera was painting his Rockefeller Center mural, and finished it after they returned to Mexico City. On the back she wrote in chalk: 'I painted this in New York when Diego was painting the mural in Rockefeller Center.' While Rivera celebrated American industrial progress, Kahlo produced an ironic inventory of it.

Her own figure is absent — unusual for her — replaced by an empty Tehuana dress, the Mexican costume she famously wore, suspended on a blue ribbon between a porcelain toilet raised on a neoclassical column and a gold sporting trophy. Around it she pasted and painted emblems of the United States: skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, a Capitol-like building fronted by a statue of George Washington, a church window, a cinema poster of a platinum-blonde starlet, an overflowing trash can and a fire hydrant stamped with a red star. Commentators read the empty dress as her own displacement — her body in America, her life in Mexico — and the whole as a criticism of capitalism and its decaying values.

The painting was first exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1938 under the title My Dress Was There Hanging, and in Paris in 1939 as Ma robe était pendue là. Kahlo gave it to her San Francisco physician and friend Leo Eloesser; it later passed to his companion Joyce Campbell, who sold it in 1993.