Introduction

This exhibition showcases the remarkable eight-decade career of ninety-nine-year-old artist Luchita Hurtado. Born in Maiquetía, Venezuela, in 1920, Hurtado moved to New York to live with her mother at the age of eight. An independent spirit from a young age, she chose to attend the all-girls Washington Irving High School in Manhattan to study art, unbeknownst to her family, who believed she was studying to be a dressmaker. By her early twenties, Hurtado was making art consistently, a habit she would later describe as “a need, like brushing teeth.” Yet for many years, this art-making took place mostly in private—at night, after her children were asleep, or in makeshift studio spaces as small as a closet.

Hurtado, who is still active as an artist, developed her fiercely original practice almost entirely independent of mainstream styles and movements. Hallmarks of her work include forays into abstraction, experiments with language, engagements with nature and ecology, and, most significantly, a persistent recourse to self-portraiture and the human figure. Some of these motifs reappear in multiple bodies of work or in combination with one another. Throughout her paintings and drawings, Hurtado consistently plays with the possibilities of line, color, pattern, and form.

Although she is truly a citizen of the world (having lived in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Italy, and Chile, among other places), Hurtado has primarily resided in Santa Monica since the early 1950s. It is especially fitting that LACMA, with its dual commitments to presenting the history of art in Southern California and championing the work of women artists, now has the opportunity to share Hurtado’s work with her hometown audience.