Luchita Hurtado came to prominence at the age of 98 (98!) when she burst onto the art scene--after eight decades of creative labor.
She went to an all-girls school. She lived around the world. She developed a keen interest in anti-fascist political movements. She volunteered at a Spanish-language newspaper. At night, she created totemic figure drawings with watercolor and crayon. She made art at her kitchen table, in the closet while the baby slept, in the backyard, finally, in her own studio. She made clothes, jewelry, squirreled away 1200 paintings signed L.H.
She redefined the connection between the body and the natural world, earth and sky, artist and subject. “I decided I was related to everything,” she explained.
Hurtado had one, two, three husbands and, in her obituary, there is a recitation of all the men she cared for and stewarded and how she somehow still made time to redefine the world for the rest of us, even if it took 80 years for us to discover that.
“Her husband abandoned her and their children when the second of their two sons was still an infant — he ‘just came for his books and left, and I never saw him again.’”
“To support her family, she worked as a window dresser for the Lord & Taylor department store and as a freelance fashion illustrator.”
“The marriage began to unravel after Ms. Hurtado’s son Pablo, from her first marriage, died of polio. Grief-stricken, she wanted to have another child; her husband did not.”
“She raised two sons with [her third husband] and supported his career, working on her own art at night when everyone else was asleep.”
In the early 1970s, she painted the ‘I Am’ series where she treats her body as landscape. Hurtado erases the notion of “the gaze”; she paints entirely from the perspective of self. Looking toward the floor over breasts and knees, hips and hands toward her own, foreshortened feet, Hurtado asserts autonomy, reclaims her body—and ours.
At the end of the decade, she inverts “the downward facing perspective of her earlier ‘I Am’ paintings to extend to the sky.” Looking upwards toward the sky, she catches the corners of canyon tops and animates the scenes with clouds and feathers. The result is as light and untethered as her bodily landscapes are rooted and weighty.
According to her website, “These works function as symbolic proxies and intimate meditations on the Earth as mystic progenitor, underscoring the interconnectedness between corporeality and the natural world.”
Woman as mediator between earth and sky. Woman as translator, tether, sinew, connective tissue. The umbilical cord of the earth is the moon, painted in 1977.
I can’t say what it is about her paintings of the sky that are most compelling, whether it is her ability to capture what it feels like to toss your head back and crane your neck to look upward and how that both constrains and expands your view. How she captures the abstraction and the specificity of the sky. Or her ability to convey both the softness and gravitas, temporality and permanence of all that inhabits the world above. I might just love blue. And clouds. And feathers.
“When I think about my painting and the political and the planet,” she told the artist Andrea Bowers, “it’s about the hope that it’s not too late and that people can still get together and in whatever small way make a difference that adds up.”
She reminds us, simultaneously, both how small and how significant we are in the life of the earth and sky.
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Want to check out her work? Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected at the Harwood Museum, Taos, NM will be on display through February 2024. Well worth your time.
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