Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was a creative genius, an intellect who was ahead of her time. She was a strong woman, unabashedly herself and unafraid to show her true colors, rawness and vulnerability with the world.

Yet the same time, there was another piece to her beautifully complex artistic realm where the enlightened yet tormented muse intensely connected with the natural world. A place where plants and animals represented innovative scientific, worldly and personal themes and personal connections.

In celebration of this unexplored side of Kahlo, The New York Botanical Garden is showcasing its first solo presentation of Kahlo's work in New York City in over 10 years with "FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life." The exhibition focuses on the artist's intense interest in the botanical world, her engagement with nature in her native Mexico, as seen in her garden and decoration of her home, the garden that she shared with her famous husband, artist Diego Rivera, as well as her complex use of plant imagery in her painting.

The exhibition also transforms many of The New York Botanical Garden's spaces and gardens and reimagines Kahlo's studio and garden at the Casa Azul (Blue House) in the EnidA. Haupt Conservatory. It also includes a rare display of more than a dozen original paintings and drawings on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library's Art Gallery.

On Tuesday, The New York Botanical Garden wowed the press with a special preview of the exhibition that left this writer in awe of the continuous exploration of layers of this treasured artist who left an impression on her since her youth.

The sun was out in full force almost as if Mother Nature was tipping her hat to Kahlo for her intense appreciation for nature and recognition of its power. NYBG President & CEO Gregory Long shared his gratitude to all who have helped bring the project to fruition over a two-year period. During the stunning tours of the Conservatory and Library exhibitions, The Villalobos Brothers passionately serenaded the crowd.

Contemporary artist Humberto Spíndola featured a re-creation of his tissue-paper installation from the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City (2009), based on Frida Kahlo's double self-portrait, "The Two Fridas" (1939).

"The pair of figures with clasped hands is inspired by Kahlo's iconic dresses [and] have been re-created with tissue paper using a Mexican folk art technique with roots in the popular arts of the 17th and 18th centuries," according to the NYBG. "It may have its origins in ancient Aztec traditions of working with amate, a paper that was traditionally made from tree bark." During the press tour, two male models showed off Spíndola's beautifully crafted tissue paper dresses used with these ancient craft techniques.

Guest curator and distinguished art historian and specialist in Mexican art, Adriana Zavala, Ph.D., also emphasized Kahlo's "profound and deep connection to the natural world," particularly with plants and to some degree animals. Kahlo "thematized the natural world, using it to engage in several concepts."

There are also several "sub themes" with one of the most important concepts was the concept of hybridity, Zavala pointed out. Kahlo used this concept during the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution as "a symbolic gesture," to represent a reconciling of traditions between the indigenous, European, Spanish, Mexican and African heritages.

"This was a very important discourse and I believe that Kahlo was very intensely engaging with this concept both as an intellectual, an individual," she added. Kahlo's mother was Mexican and her father was German, (a German immigrant who came to Mexico), "so it was personally felt."

In addition, Kahlo combines the concept of duality as a Meso-American, the "interdependence of opposites -- the sun and moon and life and death, male and female etc.," as well as "human-plant hybrids."

Kahlo, known for her intense self-portaits, also has a botancial self-portrait in her painting called "The Dream." The "delicate drawing" depicts Kahlo as laying in a "garden bed."

"She is the recumbent birth in that drawing," Zavala explained. ... "She represents the germination of the first stages of a seedling."

Kahlo "was really looking carefully at plants," she pointed out. 

According to Zavala, "it's important to think of Frida Kahlo in a global context." At the time, hybridity was looked at negatively around the world, yet Kahlo embraced it. As Mexican native living in the U.S. during the Great Depression, there was a lot of anxiety for being different, which wasn't easy to endure, but Kahlo thrived regardless.

"These are very profound and complicated concepts that I want to bring to the public to understand this exhibition," Zavala added. While many focus on her pain and suffering, Kahlo was also "an exuberant, deeply intelligent woman with a love of life - and that's what we really want to bring forward."

"FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life" will be on view at The New York Botanical Garden from May 16 through Nov. 1, 2015.