Frog Alebrije

In 1936, the renowned Mexico City artist Pedro Linares López fell ill, slipping in and out of consciousness. In his fever dream, he had a vision of a fantastical forest full of radiant creatures. These multicolored chimeras—“a donkey with butterfly wings, a rooster with bull horns, and a lion with an eagle head”—spoke their name, Alebrijes, to Linares, and imbued him with renewed health. Linares recovered from his illness with a newfound purpose, vowing to share the beauty of the Alebrijes with the world as an expression of gratitude toward the animals who had saved him from death.

Linares gave life to the Alebrijes using the medium of cartonería, a traditional Mexican papercraft used for generations to represent religious figures. From his transcendent experience, Linares was able to breathe new life into a vital cultural history. Despite Linares’ death in 1992, the life-giving Alebrijes remain an integral form of Mexican folk art today, notably as copal wood figurines produced in the state of Oaxaca. Each Alebrije is a unique hand-carved creature, an expression of vitality, wonder, biodiversity, and spirituality.

For our first two Alebrijes, we’ve chosen a pair of animals closely linked to earthly manifestations of the liminal space Linares first had his vision: The frog and the bat.