Luchita Hurtado: Self-Portraiture, ‘Mountain and Leopard’

Taos, New Mexico was a very special place to the artist Luchita Hurtado.Its powerful energy, the imposing beauty of its dominating sky and mountain ranges, and the living and ancestral presence of Indigenous people and their culture allowed her to deepen her poetic and spiritual perception that she and all life forms are interconnected.It was here that she found inspiration to explore and embrace the self as multiple, changing, and mysterious, like the rest of nature, and as part of nature.During a crucial period of her own life-from the mid-1960s to the 1970s, when she regularly visited Taos-she explored nature-centered insights about her autobiographical and transcendent identity in various series.In this brief essay, I will focus on her paintings from the mid-1960s through the 1970s in which she created self-portraits of her brown body: the striking I Am series of her clothed or unclothed torso as seen from above, looking downward; the rendering of her torso horizontally, as landscape; the abstraction of her torso in the Sky Skin series; paintings of her shadow; word paintings of words such as "yo" and "I"; and finally, her Moth Lights series, featuring mandala-like squares of luminous white, offset against surrounding soft waves of emanating color.Through considering these series, we can trace the eventual identification of the autobiographical "I" with something larger: "mountain and leopard," that is, with the more instinctual, undomesticated, and mysterious self, and with the larger natural world, as interdependent parts. 2 Luchita Hurtado was born Luisa Amelia Garca Rodrguez in Venezuela in 1920, immigrated to New York City at the age of eight to join her mother and aunts already living there, and died in 2020 in Santa Monica, California at nearly one hundred years of age. 3 Although she first exhibited her work in 1953, and had a solo show in 1974, she participated in only five other exhibitions until her work was discovered among the paintings of her deceased husband, Lee Mullican, in 2015. 4 Solo exhibitions followed in 2016 and 2017, and her work appeared in five group shows in 2018.A major solo exhibition, "I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn," opened at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2019 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020, and to the Tamayo Museum in Mexico City in 2020-2021.An exhibition catalog and a second important publication were dedicated to her work in 2019 and 2020, and she became the subject of numerous videotaped and published interviews. 5 Although minimally exhibited and written about as an artist during most of her life, Hurtado identified as an artist throughout, and was immersed in a rich social world that included the great and lesser-known names in Surrealism, Mexican modernist art, and American Abstract Expressionism.She remained part of international and US artistic and intellectual circles throughout her life.Her first husband, Daniel del Solar, was a well-connected Chilean journalist twice her age whom she met during high school while volunteering at a Spanish-language newspaper in New York City and married