Luchita Hurtado, born in Maiquetía, Venezuela in 1920, dedicated over eighty years to exploring universality and transcendence through her art. Emigrating to the United States in 1928, she settled in New York and studied at the Art Students League. Hurtado later lived in Mexico City, the San Francisco Bay Area, and finally Santa Monica, California, while frequently visiting her second home in Taos, New Mexico. Her diverse life experiences influenced her artistic style, which combined abstraction, mysticism, corporality, and landscape using unconventional techniques and materials. Despite her connections with renowned artists and intellectuals, Hurtado maintained an independent practice characterized by surrealist figuration, biomorphism, and geometric abstraction. Her work from the 1960s and 1970s evolved into contemplative self-portraits and 'Body Landscapes,' reflecting her feminist ideals and involvement with the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists.

In her later years, Hurtado focused on themes of language and nature, addressing ecological concerns and the interconnectedness of the human body and the natural world. In 2019, she was recognized in TIME 100's most influential people and received the Americans for the Arts Carolyn Clark Powers Lifetime Achievement Award. At 98, she held her first solo museum exhibition, 'I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn,' at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London, which then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020. Hurtado's enduring legacy is marked by her profound contributions to art and her unwavering exploration of the human experience.