Luchita Hurtado - Infinite Women

Born: 28 October 1920, Venezuela
Died: 13 August 2020
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

Although she was involved with art throughout her life, painter Luchita Hurtado only received recognition near the end of her life. Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2019, she landed her first solo show in a public gallery at age 98. Hurtado worked in different styles that drew elements from 20th-century avant garde and modernist art movements including Surrealism, abstraction, and Magical Realism. Among her best-known works is the 1960s ‘I Am’ series: self-portraits that Hurtado painted by looking down at her own body, often in closets as it was this only place she could work in between raising her sons and managing the home. Later works demonstrate her environmental concerns, with recurring motifs that include humans merging with trees and texts such as ‘Water Air Earth’ and ‘We Are Just a Species’.

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.

When asked if recognition came too late, with her first major retrospective at age 98, Venezuelan-American painter Luchita Hurtado responded that no, it came just at the right moment. Born in 1920, Hurtado had been making art for most of her long life when she was “discovered” in 2015. But unlike many of the other women in this book it was, in fact, for lack of trying.
As a child, her mother had moved to New York City, sending for Luchita when the girl was eight years old and spoke no English. Luchita never saw her father again. At 18, she married a Chilean journalist twice her age and moved with him to Santo Domingo. The couple would have to flee to Haiti the following year, with Hurtado pregnant with her first child, due to the sexual advances of Héctor Trujillo. Apart from his reputation as a sexual predator, Trujillo was the head of the Dominican army and brother of the ruling dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The couple returned to New York soon after, and Hurtado had her first son in June 1940, followed by a second child in 1942. Abandoned by her first husband not long after, she remarried in 1946 and moved across the country to the San Francisco area in 1949. Both her second and later third husbands were Dynaton artists, whose influences can be seen in works featuring boldly colored abstract patterns. Her second husband also sparked Hurtado’s interest in Mesoamerican art.
From her early 20s, Hurtado was immersed in the social artistic scene, with friends like dancer Ailes Gilmour, filmmaker Maya Deren, and artists Ruth Vollmer and Jeanne Reynal. As those around her rose to fame, her connections did not translate into professional success, not least because she wasn’t looking for it. Hurtado supported herself and her sons by creating window displays and murals for the department store Lord and Taylor and making fashion illustrations freelance for Condé Nast. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when she became a central figure in the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, that she showed her paintings to anyone outside her family. “Up to the time I joined the group, I had faced my paintings to the wall whenever a visitor arrived unexpectedly at my studio. This secretiveness was perhaps the result of working alone or perhaps related back to the time in art school when I could show my mother still lives and landscapes but never work done in the life-class. The change came about imperceptibly, but after being in the group for a while I discovered that I was less inhibited. I have never again faced my paintings to the wall,” she later recalled. Although her work was exhibited in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with her first solo exhibition at the Women’s Building in 1974, Hurtado shied away from attention. “I always felt shy of it. I didn’t feel comfortable with people looking at my work. There was a time when women really didn’t show their work,” she later said.
In 2015, Ryan Good, the director of her late (third) husband’s estate, found almost 1,200 undated artworks, mostly unsigned with around five percent signed “LH.” “We didn’t know the extent of it. I knew that Luchita had made some paintings, but it was a different thing to look at her entire career,” Good says. Hurtado soon had a dealer and her work was being shown internationally. “I never had anybody who promoted my work, and I never promoted my work either,” she observed in 2018. “I earned a living […] but never from my work.” She added, “I’m glad I’m sharing now, because I never felt before that I needed to share. It was the other way around: I worked to please myself.” In 2019, she was among Time Magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of the year, and died at home in 2020.