Taos County is an incredible place for people to find peace, inspiration, and clarity. This was true for the late Luchita Hurtado, a humble and dedicated wife and homemaker. Hurtado was born in Venezuela in 1920 and immigrated to the United States when she was 8 years old.
Her family settled in New York, where she attended classes at the Art Students League. After a brief stint in Mexico, Hurtado found her part-time home in Taos, New Mexico. Here, she found her inspiration and explored her identity as an incredibly talented artist. She frequently traveled between Santa Monica, California, and Taos. “She would often nail her canvas to her latilla fence and use it as an easel to paint some of her most impactful pieces,” says Harwood Museum’s Curator of Exhibitions and Collections Nicole Dial-Kay.
Many of her close friends in Taos didn’t know about her life as an artist and often identified her only as a mother and wife. As a way to share different perspectives of who Hurtado truly was, the Harwood hosted panels and events throughout the month of Jan.
It’s not uncommon for many Latina women to struggle with their identity as wives, mothers, career women, single mothers, and single women. Often, there is a vergüenza (embarrassment) connected to our journey as if we’re not doing enough to live up to societal standards and expectations, causing us to shrink our identities, not use our voice, and fall in line. Much of this vergüenza still exists today, keeping Latinas from reaching their fullest potential. Luchita challenged these barriers and broke them, leading the way for many Latina women to find their identity.
Between the 1940s and 1960s, her work was an examination of self-affirmation. She used brightly hued palettes with expressive tones. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that her work shifted to a more personal perspective, leading to the self-portraits entitled “I Am.”
Hurtado’s “I Am” series is defined by downward-gazing portraits of the artist’s body. The portraits are often set against bold textiles and include fruits and everyday objects. “This was Luchita’s way of discovering herself, by looking at herself, sort of like looking inward fully” says Dial-Kay.
In 1971, she held an exhibition called “Invisible/Visible” as a way to describe how men look at women but never truly see them for their entire identity.
She passed away in August of 2020 at 99 years of age. While she is gone, her legacy through her timeless and untouchable work remains admired and seen in museums across the world.
In total, Luchita’s work has been hosted in 12 museums across the world, including her most recent exhibit, “Earth and Sky Interjected” at the Harwood Museum in Taos. This display is being shown through Feb. 23. People who visit it can expect to see paintings in oil, watercolor, and acrylic, as well as drawings in charcoal, ink, graphite, and crayon.
“This exhibit unearths an important part of Taos’ art history that has been uncelebrated,” says Dial-Kay. “Taos is part of Luchita Hurtado’s history, which is now internationally known. She will be remembered in the art history canon.”
In 2019, Hurtado received a lifetime achievement award from Americans for the Arts and was acknowledged as one of the year’s most influential figures by TIME100. Hurtado’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
