Feature image: Luchita Hurtado via artist's website
Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected
The Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, features the exhibit Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected. The exhibit runs from July 27th, 2024, to February 23rd, 2025, and I enjoyed seeing it for myself during my first visit to Taos in September 2024.
The exhibit features the artwork of Luchita Hurtado, a Venezuelan artist born in 1920 and died on August 13th, 2020. Luchita did not become a well-known artist until 2019 when she was in her late nineties—many pieces of her artwork focus on untitled self-portraits and landscapes that use women’s bodies and nature. To my understanding, she offered different points of view and perspectives within her paintings. According to the Harwood Museum, her work reflected and explored “her diverse explorations of techniques, materials, and styles shaped by multicultural experiences.” For a first-time visitor to the Harwood Museum, the purpose of Luchita’s exhibit is “unveiling previously unseen works rooted in the landscapes and community she cherished in Taos, New Mexico.”
Luchita’s artistic style
Like most Southwest artists, Luchita was an activist and lover of nature, so most of her paintings focused on landscapes. More specifically, she painted nature, highlighting environmental themes and ecological crises. Luchita’s artwork was considered abstract because of her use of geometric shapes and her exploration of self-affirmation. I found it intriguing her artwork did not show an actual face of a person. Only to find out she was painting portraits of herself looking down. It was a self-portrait of herself! The museum shared in their program, “Her paintings serve as a bridge between inherent corporeality and the natural world through symbolic representations.” Viewers are gaining her perspective of the body and the natural world.
“We are a species, just like the dinosaurs. And just like the dinosaurs we are not in charge of the world like we seem to want to be. Trees are our cousins. We’re related to the tree directly because it breathes out and we breathe in. Sometimes I find myself touching trees and communicating with them, feeling that they’re feeling what I’m feeling.”
I Am Series
The Harwood Museum of Art featured Luchita’s I Am series, which is one of her independent creative purists. Her series was originally developed during the 1960s and 1970s. During that time, she transitioned to representative figuration, and she “used her own perspective of the body to make her presence known.” The paintings in the I Am series are: Encounter, Mascara, Untitled (Match triptych), Untitled, The Umbilical Cord of the Earth is the Moon, 1977; Mask, 1977; and Untitled, 1971. The more I looked at the paintings, the more I noticed that Mascara and The Umbilical Cord of the Earth is the Moon, 1977, offers a landscape of the sky. Luchita painted her skies by having her viewers look up as if they were on the ground. I learned from the museum, “She united the viewer’s gaze with the artist’s.” In other words, she aligned my gaze to hers by looking at a blue sky with feathers falling down night and day. Yet, she narrowed down my gaze by having New Mexico mountains, which looked like the Grand Canyon, circling the frames of each painting.
Women’s Bodies
Meanwhile, Luchida’s other paintings, such as Encounter and three paintings called Untitled, featured nude bodies shown in her series and were considered representational figures. Luchita painted the bodies from different angles, allowing her viewers to look downward as if they were their own bodies. Nevertheless, this point of view conveys Luchita’s “presence and engages viewers by challenging conventical spatial perceptions.” As a viewer and a woman myself, I came face to face with images of women’s feet, knees, stomachs, and breasts - but there was still no face. Luchita wrote, “I began to make portraits of myself looking down….There is no up and there is no down. 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.” Luchida portrayed the women’s bodies as a landscape, which are known as body landscapes. Consequently, this means Luchidta merged human bodies into the shapes of mountains and sand dunes. For a Southwest artist, mountains and sand dunes are the epitome of New Mexico.
The exhibit Luchita Hurtado: Earth & Sky Interjected paid tribute to Luchita as a Taos artist. She had an eye for the New Mexico landscapes which she painted through her skies and her perspective through the women’s bodies. Luchita reminds all young artists today that your success as an artist is a marathon, not a race. As long as you love what you do, you’ll always have success. She said, “I never stopped drawing, looking, living.” Although her artwork is still unknown within Northern New Mexico, the Harwood Museum of Art hopes Luchida’s Earth & Sky Interjected exhibit sheds light on her artwork in Taos, New Mexico, which she considered her second home.
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