In L.A., Hauser & Wirth Spotlights Luchita Hurtado’s Underrecognized Geometric Word Paintings

How strange that an artist of the caliber of Luchita Hurtado didn’t get her first solo show, “Yo Soy,” until the age of 53. Even stranger is that she should toil in virtual anonymity until 2016, four years before her death. A detour into her linear language series of word paintings, “Yo Soy,” the new show at Hauser & Wirth in downtown L.A., through Oct. 5, features nine canvases, seven of which were in her 1974 exhibit and one of which hasn’t been shown since.

In the early 1970s, Hurtado was finally able to dedicate herself to her artwork, even getting a studio outside her home. Up until then, her time had been spent raising kids, and her art practice was consigned to the kitchen table when the family was asleep or whenever she could carve out time. A recent series of self-portraits entitled I Am, an inventive first-person view looking down at her naked body, prefigured what followed—Yo Soy.

“This particular exhibition takes place in a very different time in Luchita’s life, a time when she was empowered by the feminist movement in L.A.,” Cole Root of the Luchita Hurtado Estate told Observer. “In these works, we see a different scale of art than we see in her work in the past and after. For this exhibition, she made line paintings.”

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A corner piece, Couple with Offsprings, is in bold orange and yellow over four panels. The smooth lines were applied using a modified squeeze bottle with a sponge or rag tied around the top so the paint creates a continual line. When viewed sideways, the panels read “child,” “child,” “man” and “woman.”

“I had a good response to the show, but no one saw the letters, the messages. Just the color and energy,” she wrote at the time in a document on display. “It didn’t seem important that they were not fully seen, and I thought it superfluous to explain.”

Living in Santa Monica with her third husband, artist Lee Mullican, Hurtado was an original member of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists. The year 1971 marked a turning point for her, specifically a meeting of local women artists organized by Joyce Kozloff.

“There were at least fifty women, and we began the meeting by stating our name and occupation,” Hurtado recalled. “When it was my turn, I said, ‘Luchita Mullican, painter.’ Across the room, I hear June Wayne ask in what seemed a very penetrating voice, ‘Luchita what?’ ‘I stand corrected,’ I replied. ‘Luchita Hurtado, painter.’”

A year later, she exhibited one of her I Am self-portraits in Judy Chicago and Dextra Frankel’s group show, “Invisible/Visible,” at the Long Beach Museum of Art. The following year, Chicago and fellow former CalArts faculty members graphic designer Sheila Levant de Bretteville and art historian Arlene Raven established the Feminist Studio Workshop, taking the lease near downtown on what would become the Woman’s Building. They sublet space to performance art groups as well as local chapters of the National Organization for Women, the Women’s Liberation Union, Associated Women’s Press, the Sisterhood Bookstore and three art galleries, one of which exhibited “Yo Soy.”

Face for Arcimboldo references Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who made portraits of people out of flowers in one, vegetables in another, fish or birds. Hurtado’s geometric painting in shades of red uses words, each written in place of the item it describes—mouth, jaw, forehead, eye, etc.

Dark blue and purple patchwork hides the title, Earth & Sky Interjected, a canvas cut into strips and sewn back together. A splash of bleach runs pale and white lines over heavy shades of blue in Universal Talisman, which hasn’t been exhibited in over 50 years.

Born in 1920 in Maiquetía, Venezuela, Hurtado moved to New York when she was eight. While studying at Washington Irving High School, she took classes at the Art Students League and later volunteered at La Prensa, a Spanish-language newspaper, where she met Chilean journalist Daniel de Solar, her first husband. In the early 1940s she worked as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast and as a muralist for Lord & Taylor.

“She was integrated into a community of artists around New York. Her first husband brought home Ailes Gilmore, Noguchi’s sister and a dancer at Martha Graham,” says Root, listing Noguchi and Rufino Tamayo as influences. “She was in Mexico City in the 1940s, and she talks about knowing Diego and Frida, going to parties with Leonora Carrington. Man Ray took her portrait here in L.A.”

After 1974, Hurtado toiled in obscurity and was widowed in 1998 when Mullican passed. Nearly twenty years later, his former studio director, Ryan Good, was cataloguing his estate when he found works signed “LH.” Hurtado, who normally took her husband’s name, explained that those were her initials.

Good showed the paintings to Paul Soto, founder of Park View Gallery, who mounted her second solo show, “Luchita Hurtado: Selected Works, 1942-1952.” Several of her I Am portraits and the abstract landscapes that grew out of them were on exhibit in the Hammer Museum’s 2018 “Made in L.A.” And a year later Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, mounted her first international solo show, “Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn.”

“I still have a built-in resistance to success in the large arena of the commercial world,” she wrote in the 1970s. “The thought of dealing with more than a few dozen people seems unreasonable to me, but who knows, someday soon I may learn to accept the thorn along with the blossom.”

In 2019, Hurtado appeared on the TIME100 list of most influential people. On the night of August 13, 2020, she died of natural causes at her home in Santa Monica, just a few months short of her 100th birthday.

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