Luchita Hurtado: Anima, the Telluric, and Her Art

Harwood is excited to welcome Laura E. Pérez, Ph.D., professor of Chicanx and Latinx Studies and chair of the Latinx Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, for this exciting public lecture.

Throughout her eight-decade-long practice, Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020) explored many styles of artmaking. One of the unifying threads across much of her work was the expression of the intimate connection of humans to the natural world. Her work from the late sixties on particularly captures the natural world as animated and the female body as intimately part of this greater whole. Whether through self-representation as natural landscape, or landscape as animated, or through the painting of words, Hurtado blurs the line between self and surrounding world in some of her latest works to speak about and for our ecologically imperiled planet.

Image Credit: Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, c. 1970s. Oil on canvas. 14.875 x 29.875 in. Copyright the Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy the Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.