February 14, 2026 
In conjunction with Frida: The Making of an Icon, art historian and curator Adriana Zavala sits down with artists Santa Barraza, Yreina Cervántez, and Joey Terrill. The conversation centers on Frida Kahlo's history within the Chicano/a artistic community of the 1960s and 1970s and as an icon and role model in the fight for social justice and self-representation.

About the Speakers
Adriana Zavala is an art historian who specializes in modern Mexican and contemporary US Latinx art. She currently serves as professor and chair in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Tufts University. She is the founding director of the US Latinx Art Forum and editor of Writing on Latinx Art. Zavala curated Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life at the New York Botanical Garden, and is the author of Becoming Modern, Becoming Tradition: Women, Gender, and Representation in Mexican Art and Resurrecting Tenochtitlan: Imagining the Aztec Capital in Modern Mexico City. 

Santa Contreras Barraza is a contemporary Chicana/Tejana artist and founder of Barraza Fine Art, LLC, a gallery and studio committed to furthering the appreciation of the visual arts in the Borderlands and among isolated, rural populations by showcasing creative talent. She formerly taught at Texas A&M University in Kingsville, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Penn State University at University Park, and La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her artwork has been exhibited worldwide. 

Yreina D. Cervántez is a third-generation Chicana born in Garden City, Kansas, raised in Southern California, and currently based in Los Angeles. She is professor emerita in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University Northridge. She works primarily in painting, printmaking, and muralism with a focus on mythology, cosmology, environmental and social justic, as well as the decolonized feminine body. 

Joey Terrill is an artist whose practice joins the diverse mediums of zine-making, performance, printmaking, collage, and painting into an oeuvre that tenderly encompasses his intimate experiences of intersecting queer, Chicano, and artistic communities. Drawing from the existing visual culture, Terrill combines personal photographs, found pop cultural imagery, and reproductions of artworks by queer predecessors to conjure utopian landscapes.