The Artist Who Painted Her Own Pain & Changed Feminism Before Frida Kahlo became a global icon, she was an eighteen-year-old medical student whose life was destroyed in a bus accident that left her spine broken in three places and an iron rod piercing through her body. What happened next shocked the art world—she turned her hospital bed into a studio and painted the brutal truths no woman dared to speak: miscarriage, abortion, disability, pain, and desire. By 1927, she'd joined the Mexican Commu