Obsessed with Adela Breton

Visiting Chichen Itza 130 years after Adela Breton's first trip to Mexico! To see it as she would have seen it, imagine this building half buried, half caved in, and covered in trees and vines.

My kid has a little community of fellow YouTube animators, and when they comment on each other's videos, the most popular comment (other than "uwu," of course), is to tell someone how "underrated" their channel is. It means that even though you as a YouTuber are but small and wee, the value of your work is vast, and if the general public had but access to it they'd tell you the same.

Adela Breton, then, is underrated. 

I first learned about Breton back when I was putting together a MesoAmerica unit study for my homeschooled high schoolers, and another Hispanic Heritage study for my Girl Scout troop, in preparation for our troop trip to Mexico. All of those kids in question wearily joke about my penchant for pointing out "strong female role models" to them wherever we go, as in "Oh, look! One of the dolphin trainers is a strong female role model!" and they don't even know that when I book a field trip or class for them I literally tell the organizer that we require a female firefighter or mechanic or glassblower, etc., to lead our tour. ANYWAY, obviously, then, when I was researching Mexico, I zeroed in on any positive female representation that I could find. That's how we ended up studying Frida Kahlo, and that's how I became obsessed with Adela Breton!

Adela Breton was my favorite type of Victorian female: the wealthy spinster intellectual. She was a stay-at-home daughter who cared for her parents until they died of old age, and then found herself released onto the world around the age of fifty, unmarried, child-free, and independently wealthy. 

As anyone would do if they found themselves in similar circumstances, Breton began traveling, taking years-long trips and returning to her home in England only sporadically to check in on her brother and his family and drop off her souvenirs.

It was on one of these trips that Breton first visited Mexico, and hired guides to take her to some of the many ancient sites that were then also underrated, undeveloped, and mostly unstudied. It wasn't a big deal back then to steal antiquities and make souvenirs of them, so she did a lot of that, sigh, but she also turned her prodigious art skills towards drawing and painting in watercolors the scenes she encountered, and in particular, the many murals still visible inside the buildings she visited. 

These buildings were, again, mostly unimproved, mostly untended, mostly unstudied, open to the weather and time and destruction of tourists. Breton worked off and on for the rest of her life on copying these paintings as exactly as it's possible to copy something with the human hand and eye, living for months in the wilderness with her guide and friend, Pablo. 

What Breton essentially did, in a time before cameras could do such work, was make snapshots of these sites and their features that show exactly what they looked like at that time. Not only can you see places like Chichen Itza overgrown and half-buried, but you can see perfect recreations of things that are long gone, most importantly these murals, most of which have since been destroyed, damaged, or just time-worn to the point that they're mere shadows of what they once were. 

So here's why Breton is mainly forgotten instead of lauded as a hero for saving these works for posterity: 1) she was female, so while her fellow archaeologists liked her work, they didn't appreciate it, didn't credit it, and didn't study it beyond her lifetime. 2) she was unaffiliated with a university or research organization, so approached all these sites and all professional encounters as an independent outsider. And 3) she lacked a staff or team that could have shared out the work that didn't require her professional touch, as well as keep her organized and purpose-driven. On her own, Breton did what interested her, but then got distracted with the requests of other researchers and archaeologists and wasted a ton of her precious time just copying out crap for them instead of further developing her own research. 

None of that really explains or forgives why she isn't posthumously appreciated more for her achievements. Breton left most of her artifacts and all of her art to Bristol Museum, which does not even have it on permanent display. The only record of most of a genre of historical Mexican art, and they don't even display it. Researchers barely use it or reference it. I'm planning a trip to England at some point in 2023, hopefully, and even if I go to this museum where all of her art lives, I can't even see it!

One of the very few books on the subject is Adela Breton: A Victorian Artist Amid Mexico's Ruins, which I read over winter break. It's good, but even the author admits that she couldn't access much of the Breton materials from the Bristol Museum, so imagine all the wonderful research and writing that there is to do!

Homeschool Art History: Frida Kahlo and Political Art

 

Art history isn't something that has its own curriculum on the kids' homeschool high school transcripts. Instead, at least so far, it's something that we've done as unit studies, and then I've incorporated those studies into whatever syllabus best fits it. For Will, all of her high school art studies, both hands-on and history/appreciation activities, are included as a 1-credit Fine Arts class on her transcript, and the syllabus includes details of each activity and resources used, written after the fact based on what was actually accomplished.

Syd will have numerous Fine Arts classes on her high school transcript, and it's my hope that one of them will, indeed, be Art History, although for that to be a credit that stands on its own we'll have to conduct a more thorough, extensive study at some point.

Until then, we study the art that interests the kids, as it catches their interest. And recently, that was Frida Kahlo, inspired by the Mexico study that was, itself, inspired by our Girl Scout troop's Spring Break cruise.

As we often do when we start a completely new unit of study, we started our Frida Kahlo unit with a selection of picture books. You know that expression--"Explain it to me like I'm five?" Picture books are meant to offer digestible explanations in an appealing manner, often exploring a topic through a unique lens meant to engage and inspire.

Both of these books were excellent introductions to the basics of Kahlo's life and works:

• Portrait of an Artist: Frida Kahlo
• Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World

I've been trying to relearn some of my Spanish this year, so the kids also let me read to them from this awesome book:

• Frida Kahlo y Sus Animalitos

So many animal names to look up and learn! Clearly, my college Spanish classes focused on the wrong things...

Part of the work for this study was creating activities to teach younger Girl Scouts about Frida Kahlo for our Girl Scout troop's World Thinking Day kit, so the kids chose their favorite Frida Kahlo paintings, and I used Google Image searches to find and download high-quality jpegs of them and printed them two to a page on cardstock. I try to remember to do this with all the images we study, whether they're paintings, photos, sculpture, or whatever. They come in endlessly handy for comparison and review, they make your Timeline game even bigger and better, and it's awesome how often they come in handy to build context in a different study. 

And because every good Girl Scout activity includes a craft, the kids of COURSE had to test out these Frida Kahlo paper dolls:

Beyond the picture books and paper dolls, the kids and I LOVED this American Experience documentary on Frida Kahlo:

It's a surprisingly exciting ride, with shocking moments, plot twists, stunning revelations, and a strong female lead! And it answers the question of Was Frida Kahlo The Most Epic Person To Ever Have Lived? with a resounding...

OMG yes. Hard yes. All. The. Yes.

Once we were all devoted Frida Kahlo fangirls, I wanted the kids to have some practice analyzing her art. We'd also been talking separately about different methods of political protest, from flipping off the people who harass visitors to our local Planned Parenthood to participating in a march to support abortion rights, etc., so it seemed like a good chance to use Frida Kahlo as an example of how gender affects political speech, the kinds of political issues relevant to gender issues, and how personal speech can conflate with political speech to empower both.

We did a similar study of political speech in racial justice a couple of years ago, so this unit also builds upon that one.

For this study, we focused more overtly on the definition of political art, and examples of the main types of political art:

I borrowed heavily from the PBS LearningMedia lesson on The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo for this, including borrowing the second page of this student handout for the kids to use to organize their work. 

For their culminating project in this study, I assigned the kids each a selection of Kahlo pieces, and other pieces like Shepard Fairey's Obama graphic, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, a mural that's locally infamous for including a KKK cross burning, and that lost Diego Rivera mural, and asked the kids to thoughtfully categorize each piece as personal or a specific type of political, justifying their conclusions with evidence. I wouldn't necessarily say that I agreed with all of their categorizations, but they did back up their claims with evidence!

If we'd wanted to carry this study further, the kids could have used that worksheet as the basis for any number of essays, or they could have created their own personal-as-political self portraits or political art of any category. We might do some political art, anyway, as the kids have expressed interest in coming with me to the next Bans Off Our Bodies Block Party, and obviously they can't go without excellent protest signs!

I was happy, though, for the kids to simply accomplish my main learning objectives for them: 1) to fall in love with Frida Kahlo, and 2) to widen their understanding of how we, particularly as women, can express ourselves politically in this patriarchal culture. 

Ooh, how awesome would a Frida Kahlo-themed protest sign be?!? 

Non-Seasonal Craft Alert: Plaster of Paris Sugar Skull Models, Because We're Studying El Dia De Los Muertos in April

Okay, what we were ACTUALLY doing was putting together a Mexico-themed take-home kit for another Girl Scout troop as part of our Service Unit's World Thinking Day celebration, but as my kid was researching stuff we might want to include, she said, "We should study El Dia de los Muertos sometime."

Let's just ignore, for the moment, the fact that we HAVE studied El Dia de los Muertos before--many times, actually! With this kid, you have to strike like a viper when the iron is at its very hottest. 

Seriously, remember just the other day, when we went to the local historic cemetery so the kid could take reference photos for her AP Studio Art classes? While we were there, she was literally griping that these photos wouldn't come in handy at all, because her special focus for the class was absolutely going to be mushrooms, which she was super interested in and spent all her free time sketching in various forms. 

So after the cemetery, we drove to the public library to find her a couple of reference books on mushrooms that had big, glossy photos, but then I also put some other big, glossy mushroom reference books on hold for me at our local university's library. Those finally came in for me a couple of days ago, but when I excitedly handed them to her, she was all, "Ugh! More mushroom books?!? I am not even interested in mushrooms why must you always task me with these unendurable burdens blah blah blah gripe gripe gripe!"

And that is why, the very second that my kid mentioned wanting to study El Dia de los Muertos sometime, I was all, "OMG what a coincidence you said that! Because our very next project actually happens to be El Dia de los Muertos! Weird that I didn't bring it up before. Oh, right, and the project actually begins now! Yeah, yeah... you're going to... write a research paper, that's right. Definitely a research paper. And, uh... also you're going to model a themed craft for our take-home kit."

Her research paper is quite good, although I do not understand why I have to beg both of my children to include in-text citations and a Works Cited page--surely it's so much more effort to go back and remember all your sources and add the citations later?

Anyway, along with the research paper, the kids and I made sugar skull models from plaster of Paris, and then Syd embellished them with dimensional fabric paint. It's a super easy project that does have some prep time, but the results look really, really good. To make your own plaster of Paris sugar skull models, you will need:

• plaster of Paris. Any brand is fine, but Dap is what my local hardware store carries. When my kids were little, I used plaster of Paris to make them little figurines to decorate all the time. Plaster of Paris is pretty eco-friendly, and it takes all kinds of artist media like a champ. 
• skull mold. I used the skull mold we've had for years, most notably to make our mashed potato skulls every Halloween dinner. It was already on its last legs, and I wore it into the ground with this project. I'll have to keep my eye out for a new skull mold before next Halloween, because we can't do without our mashed potato skulls!
• dimensional fabric paint. These stick great to the plaster of Paris, and have a cute, puff paint look to them. They're a little spendy for what you get, though, so if you've got younger or messier kids, you might as well put tempera or dyed school glue into little squeeze bottles for them. 

The main job is to make the plaster of Paris skull models. My skull mold held about four cups of plaster, and took several hours to harden, so it took me a couple of days to make the seven skulls that I needed:

Fortunately, embellishing the skulls is a lot less work--and a lot more fun!

Because the paint is dimensional, it did also take a few hours to dry, so if you're doing this in a shared space with a group, bring a cardboard box or tray so everybody can transport their skull home to finish drying. I noted that in the instructions I wrote to go in our Mexico take-home kit, and included a plaster of Paris skull for each kid and a large set of dimensional paint for them to share.

If I had this project to do again, I'd embed twine or wire into the plaster of Paris to use as a hanger when it dries. For Syd's sugar skull, though, I think I'm going to sand the back flat and then glue it to a bookend.