Luchita Hurtado

Luchita Hurtado (born Luisa Amelia García Rodriguez Hurtado; November 28, 1920August 13, 2020) was a Venezuelan-born American painter based in Santa Monica, California, and Arroyo Seco, New Mexico.

Born in Venezuela, she moved to the United States as a child.

Although she became involved with art after concentrating on the subject in high school and created art over eight decades, she only received broad recognition for her art towards the end of her life.

Her work has strong environmental and feminist themes that bridges many genres, bearing influence from different art movements and cultures.

Hurtado was born in Maiquetía, Venezuela, on November 28, 1920.

Her mother moved from Venezuela to New York with her two sisters and worked as a seamstress.

Hurtado and her older sister joined their mother and aunts in New York shortly afterwards in 1928, while their father stayed in Venezuela.

She studied fine art at Washington Irving High School, took classes at the Art Students League, and volunteered at La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper where she met her first husband, Chilean journalist Daniel de Solar.

The couple married when Luchita was 18 years old, and went on to have two children together.

At the invitation of Rafael Trujillo, the then-dictator of the Dominican Republic, Hurtado and de Solar moved to Santo Domingo to start a newspaper.

The couple moved back to New York, where they became close with a group of Latin American artists and journalists, such as Rufino Tamayo.

She and de Solar divorced in 1942.

She subsequently married Wolfgang Paalen, an artist and collector, after being introduced to him by Isamu Noguchi.

Hurtado's son from her first marriage, Pablo, died of polio at age 5.

She wanted to have another child, while Paalen did not, so the couple divorced.

During this time, her circle of fellow artists expanded.

One such connection she made was with Ailes Gilmour, who had roomed with Hurtado and de Solar when they were still married.

Gilmour was the half-sister of Isamu Noguchi, so Noguchi and Hurtado became close, often visiting galleries together.

In 1944, Hurtado made window displays and painted murals for Bloomingdale's.

She also began freelance work as an illustrator for Condé Nast and as a muralist for Lord & Taylor in New York.

In 1946, she and her second husband Wolfgang Paalen travelled together to Mexico to research pre-Columbian art, and Hurtado took photographs that were later published in 1952 in Cahiers d'art to accompany Paalen's article, « Le plus ancien visage du nouveau monde ».

In 1951, Hurtado moved to Los Angeles with fellow artist Lee Mullican who she would then marry that same decade, and remained married until his death in 1998.

Together, they had two sons: Matt Mullican, a New York-based artist, and John Mullican, who works as a film director.

In the 1970s, Luchita Hurtado founded the feminist group, Los Angeles Council of Women Artists.

Of her work in this exhibition, Frankel described Self Portrait (1971) as "[looking] down and sees herself in a way men never see women" . In 1974, she had a solo exhibition at the Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

Though Hurtado participated and shared feminist beliefs with many groups, when asked to join a West Coast chapter of the Guerilla Girls, she declined.

In 1972, Hurtado participated in a feminist-focused group exhibition, “Invisible/Visible,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art, which was organized by Judy Chicago and Dextra Frankel.

She died of natural causes, just 76 days short of her 100th birthday.

Outside of her work for Bloomingdale's, Conde Nast, and the two Los Angeles exhibitions she participated in, Hurtado's work was largely unknown until 2015.

Ryan Good, former studio director for Lee Mullican, Hurtado's third husband, was cataloguing his estate when he came across a number of paintings signed "LH".

Upon asking Hurtado, he learned that she was the artist behind these works.

Good showed these paintings to Paul Soto, founder of Park View Gallery, who then launched her second ever solo exhibition, Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942–1952, which ran from November 12, 2016 – January 7, 2017.

From there, her career erupted.

Hurtado's work was included in the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. exhibition in 2018.

She was called the "hot new discovery" of the exhibition by the L.A. Times, and generally received extremely favorable critical reception.

Hurtado was named as one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2019.

Hurtado died on the night of August 13, 2020, at her home in Santa Monica, California.

Eventually her work caught the attention of Hans Ulrich Obrich, a Swiss art curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in which she had her first international solo exhibition, titled Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn. She remained active in the arts until her death, with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibiting a key career survey of hers in February 2020.

Several visitors asked the curators if her birth date was incorrect because the work seemed contemporary.

Hurtado's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.