Luchita Hurtado: Anima, the Telluric, and Her Art

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

Thursday, August 15 at 6:00 pm

Pay What You Wish Admission

Throughout her eight decade long practice, Luchita Hurtado (1920-2020) explored many styles of art-making. 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. 

About Dr. Laura Perez 

Laura Elisa Pérez is the author of Chicana Art: The Politics of Spiritual and Aesthetic Altarities (Duke University Press 2007); Eros Ideologies:  Writings on Art, Spirituality, and the Decolonial (Duke University Press 2019), a National Chicana and Chicano Studies Association Book Award Honorable Mention 2021; Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision (Duke University Press 2022), co-edited with Ann Marie Leimer, awarded the College Art Association’s Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publishing Grant and short-listed for the R. L. Shep Memorial Book Award from the Textile Society of America in 2023; and Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (University of California Press and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 2023), co-edited with María Esther Fernández, an ALAA-Thoma Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award Honorable Mention, 2024. She curated Chicana Badgirls: Las Hociconas (2009), with Delilah Montoya; Labor+a(r)t+orio: Bay Area Latina@ Arts Now (2011); and the traveling retrospective Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory (2023-25), with María Esther Fernández. She is Professor in Chicanx, Latinx, and Ethnic Studies and Chair of the Latinx Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD at Harvard University and a BA/MA Joint Degree at The University of Chicago. 

Image Credit: Luchita Hurtado, Untitled, c. 1970s. Oil on canvas. 37.8 x 75.9 cm / 14 7/8 x 29 7/8 inches. © The Estate of Luchita Hurtado. Courtesy The Estate of Luchita Hurtado and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Jeff McLane.