Me and My Parrots

Me and My Parrots (Yo y mis pericos) is an oil-on-canvas self-portrait by Frida Kahlo, made in 1941; the picture long belonged to the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harold H. Stream in New Orleans. Kahlo shows herself half-length in a white blouse, her dark hair piled high, holding a cigarette between ringed fingers while four parrots perch on her shoulders and gather in her arms.

The painting is unusually well documented: in 1941 Nickolas Muray photographed Kahlo beside the finished canvas at Coyoacán, so the painted and the photographed Fridas meet in one scene. It was made in the year her father Guillermo died and months after her remarriage to Diego Rivera. Press and auction-house accounts place the Stream family's acquisition of the portrait during a trip to Mexico in the early 1940s. One scholar, Andrea Kettenmann, has read the four parrots as allusions to Kahlo's relationship with Muray, though the birds were also simply part of the menagerie of monkeys, dogs and parrots she kept at the Casa Azul.

Measuring 82 by 62.8 centimetres, the portrait was shown in the Whitney Museum's exhibition Vida Americana in 2020–2021. It has an explicit afterlife of its own: in 2001 the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura restaged the four-parrot composition in a colour photograph titled An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo (Four Parrots).