At nine o’clock on the evening of November 28, 1920, Luisa Amelia García Rodríguez, later known as Luchita Hurtado, is born in Maiquetía, a coastal city on the Caribbean Sea northwest of Caracas, Venezuela. Her mother, Teolinda Rodríguez, goes into labor while bathing in the sea.

Hurtado is named after a relative, Luisa Malia, who owns the property on which the family lives. Her sister, María Cecilia García Rodríguez, is two years older. Their mother works as a seamstress, and their father, Pedro José García, is a sales representative for Singer sewing machines.

Hurtado’s brother, Pedro Jose Garcia Rodriguez is born.

Hurtado’s mother, Teolinda Rodríguez, emigrates from Venezuela to New York City, joining her younger sisters, Margot and Marietta, who are already living there with their children. Teolinda brings Hurtado’s older sister, María Cecilia, with her, while Hurtado and her younger brother, Pedro, remain in Venezuela.

Hurtado and Pedro are cared for by two of their father’s aunts. Manana cooks for and looks after Hurtado, while Manina assumes primary responsibility for Pedro. Hurtado’s grandmother, Rosario Rodríguez, teaches her to sew, crochet, and embroider, introducing her at an early age.

Hurtado later traces her earliest awareness of herself as an artist to the intense sensory experiences of her childhood. She recalls following an unfamiliar, pungent fragrance through the garden and discovering a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. She is similarly captivated by the sensory richness of Catholic ritual: its music, flowers, incense, and ceremonial atmosphere. Although she would later reject the authority of the Church, its aesthetic and ritual dimensions left a lasting impression.

In December, Teolinda returns to Maiquetía to bring eight-year-old Hurtado to New York. Her departure from Venezuela marks the last time Hurtado sees her father. Mother and daughter travel by ship via Puerto Rico, arriving at Ellis Island on December 13. Hurtado recalled seeing snow for the first time upon their arrival.

Upon arriving in New York, Hurtado speaks Spanish and little English. She lives in Inwood, in northern Manhattan, with her mother, sister, aunts, and cousins. Listening closely for words that sound similar in Spanish and English, she gradually teaches herself English. As her fluency develops, she begins to feel more at home in the city. Her mother continues to work as a seamstress and later marries a Cuban man who has a daughter from a previous marriage.

During these years, Hurtado begins a lifelong practice of collecting, initially amassing books. After reading an account of Tomás de Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, she tells her mother that she will no longer participate in the Church.

With little exposure to art within her family, Hurtado seeks out opportunities to educate herself. After meeting a group of young women who share her interests in art and theater, she decides to attend Washington Irving High School, an all-girls technical school near Union Square. She commutes two hours round trip by subway from Inwood. Although her mother expects her to train in dressmaking, Hurtado chooses instead to study art and theater.

Hurtado excels in her art classes and is selected to create a watercolor of Gramercy Park for the cover of the school magazine. Because the park is privately accessible, she is entrusted with a key so that she can study and depict its fountain. Hurtado later remembers this gesture as an important early affirmation of her abilities as an artist.

Only upon Hurtado’s graduation does her mother discover that she has been studying fine art rather than training as a seamstress. Encouraged by Robert Beverly Hale Robert Beverly Hale, Hurtado begins auditing classes at the Art Students League of New York.

Eager to become politically engaged and contribute to antifascist efforts during the Spanish Civil War, Hurtado spends the summer following her graduation volunteering at La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper in New York. There she meets Daniel del Solar, a Chilean journalist working for the Associated Press. Del Solar invites her to coffee, where the two discuss politics.

In an untitled drawing dating from approximately 1938, Hurtado depicts an abstracted stovetop encircling a ring of blue flame. Executed in graphite and colored pencil, the work anticipates two concerns that would recur throughout her practice: the use of color to evoke light and a downward-looking perspective that positions the viewer above the subject.

On July 29, 1939, Hurtado and Daniel del Solar marry in a small, impromptu ceremony in Long Island City. Through del Solar, she meets Carlos Dávila, a Chilean journalist, diplomat, and former head of government who briefly led Chile during the political upheavals of 1932.

The couple lives for approximately a year in a house surrounded by pine trees. During this period, Hurtado forms a close friendship with Flor de Oro Trujillo, the dictator’s eldest daughter. While living in the Dominican Republic, Hurtado learns that she is pregnant with her first child.

Flor de Oro informs Hurtado that her uncle Héctor Trujillo, a general in the Dominican armed forces and the brother of Rafael Trujillo, wishes to take her on a date. Understanding the invitation as coercive rather than optional, Hurtado decides to leave the Dominican Republic. Flor de Oro warns that Héctor may prevent her departure if she attempts to leave the country openly. Under the pretext of visiting Flor de Oro’s house near the Haitian border, Hurtado crosses into Haiti, travels by car to Port-au-Prince, and boards a ship for New York. Flor de Oro gives Hurtado a key to her apartment on Sutton Place and invites her to stay there until she returns to the city.

Hurtado and del Solar subsequently rent an apartment on the second floor of what she remembers as the tallest building in Greenwich Village. Pregnant with her first child and dissatisfied with the loose, “butcher boy” style of contemporary maternity wear, Hurtado begins designing and sewing her own clothes. Garment-making becomes a lifelong creative practice through which she explores color, pattern, texture, and utility.

On June 13, Hurtado gives birth to her first child, Daniel del Solar Jr., at the French Hospital in New York. Hurtado later remembered his birth on the eve of German entry into Paris.

Daniel del Solar meets Ailes Gilmour while she is looking for a place to live. An early member of Martha Graham’s dance company and the half-sister of artist, designer, and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi, Gilmour moves into the family’s apartment at del Solar’s invitation. She sleeps in Daniel Jr.’s room; because the apartment has only one bedroom, Hurtado and del Solar sleep in the living room.

While teaching at the Dalton School in New York, Rufino Tamayo stays with Hurtado and del Solar, returning to Mexico during the summers to be with his wife, Olga. Hurtado and Tamayo spend evenings discussing art and develop a game in which they name an object and determine the precise combination of colors required to reproduce it. Their conversations develop into a close friendship.

At Hurtado’s kitchen table, Tamayo completes Animals (1941), a painting of two snarling dogs now in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, along with other works. Tamayo introduces Hurtado to his dealer, Pierre Matisse, who, in turn, introduces her to artists including Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró.

Hurtado meets Frida Kahlo in New York and attends a gathering in Kahlo’s hospital room. Although confined to bed, Kahlo receives her guests in traditional Tehuana dress. Hurtado later recalls the unlikely convergence of hospital room and social gathering as a scene of Surrealist theater.

On July 28, Hurtado gives birth to her second son, Pablo del Solar, at the same French hospital in New York where Daniel Jr. had been born. Hurtado, del Solar, and their two sons move from the second floor to the thirteenth floor of the same building on Christopher Street.

In November, Isamu Noguchi returns to New York after spending six months at the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, a federal incarceration camp for Japanese Americans. Although exempt from forced removal as a New York resident, Noguchi had entered the camp voluntarily, hoping to improve conditions for those confined there. Upon his return, Ailes Gilmour introduces him to Hurtado, and the two form a close and enduring friendship. Noguchi is already a prominent artist, having recently completed News (1938-1940), a monumental stainless-steel relief for the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center.

Noguchi hosts gatherings at his studio on MacDougal Alley, where Miss Expanding Universe (1932), a suspended cast-aluminum figure, hangs from the ceiling above a sofa. Hurtado later recalls its outstretched arms and the unsettling impression that the sculpture might fall at any moment.

Within this expanding New York circle, Hurtado befriends Ruth Vollmer, Jeanne Reynal, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, as well as architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller and experimental filmmaker Maya Deren.

Also in 1942, Hurtado paints what is considered her earliest known work on canvas, an ethereal nocturnal landscape depicting two flattened, stylized deer, one lowering its head to drink from a moonlit pond.

Throughout the 1940s, alongside biomorphic figure drawings, Hurtado develops works on paper using the ink-resist technique. She draws animated, totemic forms in waxy crayon before applying an ink wash across the surface. The crayon repels the water-based ink, which permeates the exposed paper and gathers between the colored marks, producing a dense, mottled field of droplets and irregular contours. Often working at night after her children have gone to sleep, Hurtado makes art at the kitchen table, integrating her practice into the rhythms and spaces of domestic life.

Daniel del Solar accepts a position as an editor at Time magazine in Washington, D.C., prompting the family to relocate to Falls Church, Virginia. Hurtado and del Solar divorce later that year, after which she returns with her sons to the family’s former apartment in New York.

Back in the city, Hurtado participates in informal gatherings at New York automats, where artists and intellectuals meet for extended conversations about art. Among those who frequent these gatherings are Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Josef Albers, André Breton, and Willem de Kooning. Hurtado later recalls Breton holding court at a Horn & Hardart automat on Fifty-Seventh Street, transforming the inexpensive cafeteria into an informal counterpart to the cafés of Paris.

When Hurtado’s mother returns to Venezuela, Hurtado and her two young sons move into her mother’s New York apartment, which they share with Hurtado’s cousin Herminia. To support her family, Hurtado creates window displays and murals for Lord & Taylor and works as a freelance fashion illustrator for Condé Nast. Describing the preparation of her portfolio, Hurtado recalled that she ‘looked through the magazines to see what was being done. And [I] did the opposite.’

Although raising two young children as a single mother presents considerable challenges, supporting her family also affords Hurtado a measure of independence. Her earnings enable her to continue collecting objects that hold aesthetic and cultural significance for her. Among these is Standing Bear’s Battle of the Little Bighorn, a large pictorial work executed in pencil and ink on muslin. Hurtado purchases the work from a New York gallery for approximately one hundred dollars, initially securing it with a five-dollar deposit and paying the remaining balance over time.

One of Hurtado’s closest friends during this period is Ann Alpert Matta, the first wife of Roberto Matta’s. Ann is raising young twin sons, including the future artist Gordon Matta-Clark. The two women support one another in the intertwined demands of friendship, work, and motherhood.

During the mid-1940s, Hurtado continues to develop her ink-resist works, drawing brightly colored forms in waxy crayon before applying washes of black ink. Animated, totemic figures emerge from their mottled surfaces, often appearing to dance with their arms raised. Hurtado later recognizes affinities between these figures and forms encountered in both the natural world and prehistoric art, particularly the markings on a butterfly’s wings in Venezuela and the painted figures on the walls of the caves at Lascaux.

Through Isamu Noguchi, Hurtado befriends the Sarabhais, a textile family from India with office in Rockefeller Center. Hurtado is close friends with Gautam Sarabhai, whose sister Mridula is involved with Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for India’s independence.

Isamu Noguchi invites the Sarabhai family and Hurtado to visit a museum along with his friend, Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian artist living in Mexico who is in New York for his exhibition at Galerie Nierendorf. After meeting, Paalen invites Luchita for coffee and they talk about anthropology and Native American cultures. During Paalen’s opening he tells Luchita to pick out a work as a gift.

Hurtado has dinner with Paalen and their mutual friend, Jane Bowles, while he is in New York. Paalen invites Hurtado to Mexico to see the Olmec heads in La Venta and San Lorenzo. As her two sons are in summer camp, Hurtado accepts his invitation and her cousin Herminia watches her sons while she takes a train to Mexico City.

During this time Wolfgang Paalen is living in Mexico where he founded the Post-Surrealist publication DYN, with artists Alice Rahon and Eva Sulzer. Other artists involved with the DYN journal include Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Doris Heyden, Robert Motherwell, César Moro, and Rosa Rolanda, though Paalen produced the majority of the content under pseudonyms. The DYN journal seeks to break away from André Breton and the Surrealists, to define a new aesthetic and cultural order that looks to ancient Mesoamerican culture as a guide in a blend of art, science, and religion.

After taking the train to Mexico City, Hurtado arrives in La Venta on a two-seater learner’s plane, which she briefly flies, before the pilot lands in a cow pasture. While in La Venta they live on a house boat and sleep on the deck. They eat meals at the bow of the boat under a lantern. In the evenings the water is covered with moths that are attracted to the light, covering it like white ‘snow in heat’, as Hurtado describes it.

Paalen has a passion for finding, buying, selling, and exchanging rare artifacts. When he hears of rare pre-Columbian Mayan textile weavings that are only produced in a school house in the mountains, he is determined to have them, so they stay overnight in the schoolhouse and sleep on benches. The group travels on to visit San Lorenzo, where Paalen lives, and there he proposes to Hurtado.

Hurtado returns to New York where she writes to Paalen agreeing to bring her two sons to come and live with him in Mexico. Upon arriving in Mexico, Paalen and Hurtado marry in a small village by candlelight.

Paalen, Hurtado, Daniel Jr., and Pablo live in a house in San Ángel, Mexico City, where Paalen has his studio. They travel to Southern Mexico in search of pre-Columbian archaeology. As Hurtado describes, ‘Before I went to Mexico I heard it’s all music, all song, it’s gorgeous and people are beautiful and everything is wonderful, and it’s a happy place. And you go to Mexico City and you realize why this goddess of the earth looks the way she does. She has a skull head, a skirt full of rattlesnakes, eagle claws. It’s something in the earth that you know, there’s something special here. You feel that it goes beyond just being beautiful. You see, it has power. It has something very strange. If you’d have touched the right stone or touched the right tree, you could possibly go into another dimension.’

Paalen and Hurtado travel to Acapulco and elsewhere searching for artifacts. One piece Paalen collects is from New Guinea, a shamanistic object Hurtado cannot bear to be around. Paalen sells it and Hurtado is relieved when it leaves their home.

During this time, Paalen is working to publish the final copy of the DYN journal, working so intensely he often made himself sick. Paalen’s studio is full of rare objects, including a colonial Christ made from papier-mâché and a dried whale penis Hurtado describes as looking like a boat. Hurtado works in the corner of Paalen’s studio, making small, colorful paintings and illustrations for New York magazines. Hurtado describes them, stating; “the paintings I was making in the late 1940s had bright pinks that reminded me of my aversion to those blush colors that I avoided wearing in my native Venezuela. I also loved dark hues, blues, and key-lime greens akin to tropical flora.” Hurtado is hesitant to show her work to anyone, and turns her paintings onto their fronts when she leaves the studio. Pablo and Daniel Jr. attend a Swiss-German boarding school not far from Mexico City.

Hurtado becomes close friends with Leonora Carrington in Mexico City. Additionally, she spends time with painters Remedios Varo, and Miguel Covarrubias, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, artist Gordon Onslow Ford, photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, dealer and ethnologist Julius Carlebach, and anthropologist Joseph Spinden.

Hurtado agrees to help transport artifacts from Mexico to the Brooklyn Museum for Spinden. Upon her arrival in the United States, police seize the luggage suspecting the artifacts contain drugs. Hurtado’s papers are temporarily revoked and she is not allowed to leave New York for months. During this time, she lives with Jeanne Reynal through whom she meets Marcel Duchamp. Hurtado travels to Washington D.C. with a friend to regain her paperwork.

In January Hurtado and Paalen travel to visit Gordon Onslow Ford and Jacqueline Johnson, who have left Mexico for San Francisco and encourage Wolfgang to move to San Francisco as well. Wolfgang Paalen and Gordon Onslow Ford were previously involved in the 1930s Parisian circle of Chilean-born Surrealist painter, Roberto Matta, while Jacqueline Johnson was regarded highly in Parisian Surrealist circles. Johnson, Onslow Ford, and Paalen moved to Mexico to escape the war and it was there, in 1942, Paalen started publishing the DYN journal.

During their visit, they meet Lee Mullican. On their way to San Francisco, Hurtado and Paalen stop in Los Angeles to visit Man Ray in his Hollywood studio, where he takes Luchita’s portrait.

In November Mullican visits Paalen and Hurtado in Mexico.

With a desire to leave Mexico, the place where her child passed away, Hurtado and Paalen move to Mill Valley, California. Onslow Ford helps them purchase a three-story grey nineteenth-century house surrounded by redwoods just outside of San Francisco. Hurtado senses that the new house contains bad spirits and she experiences strange activity such as a room suddenly filling with the smell of flowers, or seeing her cat, named Mouse, startled by an invisible figure in the stairway.

At the age of nine Daniel Jr. relearns English after speaking only Spanish in Mexico. After buying the house Paalen, Hurtado, and Daniel go to New York while Gordon Onslow Ford and Jacqueline Humphries move in to watch over it until the family returns in June. Upon the family’s return, Onslow Ford and Humphries go back to their house in San Francisco.

After living with fellow artist Jack Stauffacher, Lee Mullican is looking for a place to live. In 1949 he moves into the top floor of the Mill Valley house. Mullican had just discovered a painting technique which became his signature, using a pallet knife to apply paint rather than a brush, which came about when he picked up Jack Stauffacher’s printing knife and began painting with it, forming standardized lines on the canvas.

As neither Paalen nor Hurtado drive, Paalen buys a car and Mullican drives them around. Onslow Ford, Humphries, Paalen, Hurtado, and Mullican would host large dinners at the Mill Valley house and spend hours playing Surrealist games.

The Dynaton group is formed by Paalen, Onslow Ford and Lee Mullican, and they collectively work towards an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, planned for 1951. The ‘Dynaton’ group is named by Paalen after the Greek for ‘the possible’. Paalen keeps his studio in a small room above the house and Luchita works on her paintings in the dining room.

In San Francisco, Hurtado befriends Paalen’s friends, Jean Varda and Robert Motherwell. She also befriends Grace Morley. Hurtado spends time with art historian Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, poet James Broughton and philosopher Alan Watts.

While not considered a member of the Dynaton collective, Hurtado works separately on her paintings at night after everyone goes to sleep.

The Dynaton exhibition takes place at The San Francisco Museum of Art.

After losing her son to polio Hurtado yearns to have another child however Paalen does not want children. He moves back to Paris where he makes amends with Breton.

Hurtado and Lee Mullican become a couple.

The Dynaton group disassembles and exits San Francisco just as the Bay Area Figurative Movement is emerging. Gordon and Jacqueline stay in San Francisco, although they sell their home and live on a ferry boat with Jean Varda and Alan Watts.

Mullican, Daniel Jr., and a Hurtado, pregnant with her third son, travel through New Mexico to Texas where they part ways, Mullican going to his home state of Oklahoma where he has exhibitions, and Hurtado and Daniel Jr. to Venezuela where Hurtado plans to have the baby.

Hurtado’s sister in Venezuela tells her that their mother would be upset if she arrives pregnant and alone. Hurtado considers going back to New York where she has friends and family, but without winter clothes she decides to return to California, this time to Los Angeles.

Hurtado has two close friends in Los Angeles at the time, Iris Tree whom she knew from New York, and Sheila and Giles Healey. Hurtado originally met Sheila and Giles Healey in the jungle in Mexican while with Paalen. Sheila encourages Hurtado to come to Los Angeles.

After arriving, Hurtado gets a motel room on the beach at Roy’s Motel for her and Daniel to stay in while she looks for an apartment. Just after seeing Daniel off to his first day of school Hurtado goes into labor and calls Sheila who takes her to the hospital where she gives birth to her son Matthew. In the hospital, Hurtado looks in the newspaper for a place to live and finds a furnished apartment in Santa Monica. Without seeing the apartment, over the phone Hurtado settles with the landlord that she and her two sons will move in just after she leaves the hospital.

Hurtado learns how to drive, enabling her to locate a more permanent home. She finds a 1926 bungalow in need of some repair, but located by the ocean and with a garden, she, Daniel, and Matthew move into their new home in Santa Monica.

In January Mullican returns from Oklahoma. Hurtado and Mullican quickly partake in Santa Monica Canyon’s social scene, spending time with , James Agee, Don Bachardy, Christopher Isherwood, Barbara Poe, Vincent Price, and Albert Lewin.
Hurtado exhibits her resist works at Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles.

Hurtado and Mullican participate in Ray and Charles Eames’ film, “Bread – The Movie” (1953).

Hurtado and Matthew go to Venezuela to visit her family.

Encouraged by a friend, Hurtado auditions for the movie The Egyptian (1954), directed by Michael Curtiz, and is cast as a court lady. She recalls the Surrealist scene of watching the cast members from The Egyptian eating lunch with the cast of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954).

Mullican is working with Rachel Rosenthal’s improvisational theatre group ‘Instant Theater’ in Hollywood. Hurtado collaborates with Rosenthal on a film performance of Hurtado slowly taking pins out of her hair.

In the 1950s Hurtado continues her ‘resist’ series. The works range from figurative centaur-like creatures that merge with abstracted forms and landscapes. Hurtado expands on the materials she uses to render her figurative-abstractions to include oil paints. In this period she also begins painting self-portraits including depictions of birth from her perspective, a point of view that she would return to throughout her oeuvre.

Hurtado’s sister Mary visits her in Santa Monica and persuades her to visit her mother in Venezuela. Hurtado travels to Caracas with Matthew while Daniel Jr., who is starting high school, stays in California with Mullican

While in Venezuela Hurtado’s sister’s husband arranges for Hurtado to work at a conference in Caracas. During a visit to the Natural History Museum, a butterfly flies in through the open doors. To Hurtado’s surprise, the butterfly’s markings resemble the totemic figures she is painting at the time, and which have featured in her drawings since New York. While trying to find work in Venezuela, Hurtado creates ads for Polar beer on spec.

In the spring of 1956 Hurtado leaves Venezuela to visit New York for a few of months before returning to California. At the age of five, Matthew relearns English after switching to Spanish in Venezuela. Hurtado and Matthew return to Santa Monica.

Hurtado states; ‘Venezuela is an extraordinary country […] I feel about this mountainous tropics much as I imagine Lee feels about the desert. Here is, for me, if not the answer, the clue.’

On February 27th, Hurtado and Mullican marry.

Mullican receives a Fulbright Guggenheim Grant decides to go to Rome for a year, bringing his family with him. Mullican, Hurtado, and Matthew drive across the country to New York, where Mullican has an exhibition. As they are traveling through New York they come across Daniel Jr. hitchhiking his way to Harvard and give him a ride.

Hurtado, Mullican, and Matthew take a boat from New York to Africa. They buy insects in Casablanca, Morocco and continue their travels, eventually arriving in Rome in autumn and live in their apartment from October to June. Mullican secures a studio near the Campo de’ Fiori. During their stay, La Dolce Vita (1960) is being filmed and Mullican and Hurtado meet Italian film director Federico Fellini.

While in Rome, the family receives an American Express message from Daniel Jr. that Wolfgang Paalen has died.

In their Rome apartment, Mullican and Hurtado entertain Louise Nevelson, Peggy Guggenheim, Willem De Kooning, and Isamu Noguchi, who stops in Rome while on his way to Israel.

During a visit to the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Hurtado encounters Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622). She is struck by the image of the woman transforming into a tree. This allegory influences her drawings and paintings of trees as self-portraits.

In summer the family camps around Europe, following prehistoric sites from Altamira, to Lascaux, to Carnac, and Brittany. They then travel on to London, Paris, Switzerland, and Italy.

The family returns to the United States and rents a farmhouse with Ailes Gilmour in Croton Falls in upstate New York for six months.

In the late spring Mullican, Hurtado, Matthew, and their new cat Speckles, drive from New York to San Francisco. After teaching a summer course at the University Southern California, Mullican is hired at the University of California Los Angeles.

Hurtado secures a studio for herself in the Santa Monica Canyon. She is thrilled to have, for the first time, a studio with a door that closes.

Mullican and Hurtado meet instrument maker and composer Harry Partch..

Hurtado’s fourth son John is born.

In October, Hurtado, Mullican, Matt, and John travel to San Francisco for an exhibition of Mullican’s work.

In the early 1960s, Hurtado is working with brightly-colored inks on paper. The saturated pigments pool and bleed outwards, suggesting defined, muscular bodies. Although sometimes a solo figure, many of the ink drawings depict a duo or group of bodies interacting.

‘During the 1960s, Hurtado continues portraits of herself in mirrors and looking downward from her point of view. She later remarks, ‘At a certain point, I said, “there is no way that I can express, let’s say, except by painting myself.” So I began to make portraits of myself, looking down. There is no up and there is no down. That’s a very important element. Things that I did during that time, they were looking down at myself. I said, “This is a landscape, this is the world, this is all you have, this is your home, this is where you live. You are what you feel, what you hear, what you know.”’

In the late 1960s Hurtado lays claim to a female subject position as she paints directly from her perspective, either looking downward at the landscape of her body, or up at the sky. She says, ‘The early canvases were corporeal, female nudes looking down at themselves, feet planted solidly on the ground and breasts like mountains. They seem to be saying “This is what I am”.’

UCLA puts together an exchange program with the University of Chile, Santiago, to which Mullican applies. He is awarded the position and the family moves to Chile. They stop in Venezuela to visit Hurtado’s family.

On the way back to Los Angeles, the family travels to Peru, Machu Pichu, and Ecuador before returning to Santa Monica.

From February to March Hurtado is an artist-in-residence with the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in New Mexico where she makes two series of lithographs.

In the 1960s and 1970s Mullican and Hurtado spend summers in New Mexico, visiting Lee’s parents in Chickasha, Oklahoma. Mullican and Hurtado fall in love with the natural surroundings of Taos and return often until deciding to buy land in 1970.

In the 1970s Hurtado has more time to dedicate to painting. and creates her ‘Sky Skin’ series, inspired by the landscape of Taos.

Although an admirer of Breton, Hurtado intentionally critiques the Surrealist movement she has been influenced by, inserting a female voice as subject, rather than muse, of Surrealist desire. In her own words, she explains ‘I admire all of the Surrealists, Breton especially, because it is a very intellectual approach. But my own work is more intuitive, as you say, poetic and in a sense direct, rather than calculated, intellectualized.’

Hurtado’s friend Joyce Kozloff puts together a lunch on March 1st, inviting women artists from the Los Angeles area. Many of the artists in attendance don’t know that the others were artists and only know them as the partners of male artists. After introducing herself to the group as Luchita Mullican, her friend, June Wayne, calls from across the room, ‘Luchita what? Luchita replies, ‘Luchita Hurtado!’ Hurtado is energized by this shift in power and finds it different from how Surrealist women talked about themselves in the 1940s and 50s. During the lunch the women discuss their different feminist, educational, and consciousness-raising projects.

With a desire to contribute Hurtado records the names and contact information of the women present and after the lunch she continues to record as many other women artists in Los Angeles as possible. Hurtado then organizes and hosts the first meeting of the ‘Los Angeles Council of Women Artists’ at her home. The group includes artists Vija Celmins, Mako Idemitsu, Alexis Smith, Miriam Schapiro, and Judy Chicago, among others.

Hurtado later remarks: ‘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. Quite on the contrary, I am quick to show them.’

In June the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists issues a report on the representation of women artists in Los Angeles museums stating: ‘The Los Angeles Council of Women Artists is an amalgam of women painters, sculptors, art historians, critics, teachers, film-makers, craftswomen, graphic artists, curators, collectors, and industrial designers. As women artists we are not seeking token acceptance into museums or galleries which have not questioned the inherent inequities in the present structure of the art world. We want to help change that structure, so that it will be more responsive to its constituency, half of which is women. We want the public to understand that our efforts are part of the efforts of women throughout this country who are working to give full, meaningful status to women in every area of our society.’

Many of the women involved in the first group would later form the Woman’s Building and Womanspace in Los Angeles.

Hurtado is included in the group exhibition ‘Visible/Invisible’ at the Long Beach Museum of Art curated by artist Judy Chicago and curator Dextra Frankel.

Hurtado is included in the group exhibition, ‘Women and Art’ at the John B. Davis Gallery at Idaho State University.

The Los Angeles Council of Women Artists opens Womanspace, a gallery on Venice Boulevard that produces exhibitions, events, and publications on women artists.

Mullican and Hurtado’s home in Taos, New Mexico is complete. Visitors to the house include Ann Matta, and her son Gordon Matta Clark, Isamu Noguchi, and artist Sam Francis. During this time Ailes Gilmour moves to Santa Fe as well.

Hurtado works from her studio off the Pacific Coast Highway, experimenting with materials. Fashioning her own ink ‘brushes’ as a way to paint as quickly as she can, she explains: ‘To achieve quickness, the evenness, and length of stroke, I needed large canvases, I rigged up bottles with nozzles that became the brushes I needed. I was having a show at Grandview in six months and I began to paint word paintings toward it. I painted large paintings, all messages, some right side up, some on their side, some cut, set apart, as life does, and sewed together again. Some were in layers atop the other.’ 84 In swift motions, Hurtado makes condensed lines that sometimes form abstracted words and phrases in Spanish and English such as ‘YO SOY’ or ‘I AM’. Pushing the series further, she then cuts some of the canvases into strips, rearranges the strips, and sews them back together, further abstracting the language.

In February Hurtado has her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles in the Grandview One gallery for which she presents her linear language series.

In the mid-70s Hurtado makes her series of white paintings on raw canvas that engage the language of words such as ‘YOU’, ‘EVE’, ‘ADAM’, and ‘WOMB’.

From February to March Hurtado visits New York for Matt Mullican’s first New York exhibition. She stays with her friend, Mia Agee and spends time with Isamu Noguchi and Ailes Gilmore.

In the late 70s Hurtado creates a series of brightly-colored ‘moth light’ works with oil paint on paper and canvas. She fills the edges with different hues, leaving the center white with the aim to ‘give off’ enough light to attract an insect.

In the late 70s Hurtado continues her ‘Sky Skin’ series with feathers weightlessly floating in bright blue skies.

In November Hurtado and Mullican travel to India where Mullican is curating an exhibition for UCLA.

Mullican and Hurtado leave Santa Monica to spend the summer in New Mexico where Mullican is included in a group exhibition. In August, they travel to Chickasha, Oklahoma. On the way back to Santa Monica Hurtado visits the Grand Canyon for the first time.

In August Mullican, Hurtado, and John travel to New York for Mullican’s exhibition with Galerie Schreiner. They stay with Ailes Gilmour. While in New York, Hurtado goes with John to the Museum of Natural History to see a feather exhibition. Hurtado describes the scene at the Natural History Museum: ‘I love that building with its stuffed animals, its glass models, flocks of children, parents patiently explaining the mysteries they’ve never learned of together. The show is all I expected it to be. Full of color and magic. Who, but a very skilled sorcerer would think of and wear a pair of feathered shoes? And an Eskimo finger puppet – as fine a sculpture as any Giacometti. And a Chinese bed valance made of peacock feathers – precise as any graph produced by a computer. And a woman’s headband covered with hummingbird breasts.’

Hurtado also attends a screening of a documentary about Isamu Noguchi at Rockefeller Center. She visits Leo Castelli who she hasn’t seen since living in New York in the 1940s. Hurtado and Mullican return to Santa Monica in the autumn. Hurtado travels to Cambridge, Massachusetts to visit John at school.

In March, Hurtado and Mullican travel to New York Hurtado takes a series of photographs of Isamu Noguchi and Buckminster Fuller at Noguchi’s opening.

In February 1988, Hurtado and Mullican travel to New York and go to India in March. After returning to Santa Monica in April, artist and curator Bruria Finkel helps Hurtado find a studio on the second floor of the Santa Monica Barker Hangar. When Mullican’s UCLA faculty studio is no longer available, he moves into this studio.

In the 1990s, Mullican and Hurtado continue to travel, visiting New York, Taos, Brussels, Paris, London, Zurich, Berlin, Spain, and Vienna. They continue to visit their home in Taos every summer, entertaining artists such as Vija Celmins, Agnes Martin, Larry Bell, Gus Foster and Ken Price.

Hurtado holds a two-person exhibition with Nancy Romero at the Transamerica Galleries in Los Angeles titled ‘West by SouthWest’ (3 December 1990 – 25 January 1991).

Hurtado’s ‘Sky Skin’ paintings are included in a group exhibition with the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California. Curated by Frank Romero, the exhibition is titled ‘The Mystical in Art: Chicano/Latino Painting’ (16 April – 26 June 1994).

On July 8th, Lee Mullican passes away.

In the early 2000s Hurtado travels to London, Oxford Barcelona, and New York. She continues to spend summers in Taos with her sons joining her and travels to New York most autumns.

Hurtado is included in the group exhibition, ‘Santa Monica Originals’ at the Santa Monica Airport, curated by Bruria Finkel (11 December 2004 – 5 February 2005).

Hurtado is included in the group exhibition ‘Women Artists of Southern California Then and Now’ at Track 16 in Los Angeles, curated by Bruria Finkel (2 – 30 June 2007).

Hurtado’s oldest son, Daniel del Solar Jr. passes away in Oakland, California.

A solo exhibition of work from 1942-1952 is organized by Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles (12 November 2016 – 7 January 2017).

A solo exhibition of Hurtado’s work, ‘Figures and Icons’, is organized by the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica, California (16 November 2017 – 4 January 2018).

Hurtado is included in group exhibitions including ‘Made in L.A. 2018’ at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, curated by Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale (3 June – 2 September 2018); ‘Summer Nocturne: Works on Paper from the 1970s’ at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara (10 June – 23 September 2018); ‘Painting: Now and Forever, Part III’ at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (28 June – 17 August 2018); The Gallery @ Michael’s, Santa Monica (27 January – 31 March 2018); and ‘Gallery Share’ at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles (4 – 31 March 2018).

Hurtado’s solo exhibition ‘I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn’ opens at the Serpentine Galleries, London.

Hurtado continues to work with the themes of language and nature in her new paintings. What’s most important in her work is the planet, natural elements, and the environment.

Luchita Hurtado passed away August 13th, 2020.