Luchita Hurtado

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

Luchita Hurtado studied at Art Students League of New York and Washington Irving High School. The recorded working language is Spanish and English. Residence is recorded at Santa Monica. Work by Luchita Hurtado is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Distinctions recorded are BBC 100 Women.

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. 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 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. Hurtado died on the night of August 13, 2020, at her home in Santa Monica, California. She died of natural causes, just 76 days short of her 100th birthday.

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 the 1970s, Luchita Hurtado founded the feminist group, Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. 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. 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. 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. 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. Hurtado's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Hauser & Wirth, New York, United States, Luchita Hurtado Together Forever, September 10 - October 31, 2020 Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, United Kingdom, I live I die I will be reborn, May 23 - October 20, 2019 Hammer Museum, Made in L.A. 2018, Jun 3 – September 2, 2018 Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica (2017) Park View Gallery, Los Angeles (2016) Night Club Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (2016) Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, California (1994) Grandview Gallery, The Woman's Building, Los Angeles (1974) Long Beach Museum of Art, Invisible/Visible: 21 Artists (1972) Tally Richards Gallery, Taos, New Mexico (1970) Paul Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles (1953)

She was recognized as one of the BBC's 100 women of 2019.