Channeling Luchita: A Community Response to the Life and Work of Luchita Hurtado
November 8th, 2024 - February 2nd, 2025
Opening Reception, November 15th, 2024, 5:30pm-7:30pm
(postponed from 11/8 due to winter storm)
Millicent Rogers Museum (1504 Millicent Rogers Rd, El Prado, NM)
Opening Reception is free, accessible and open to the public. Regular museum admission after 11/8; free to Taos County residents on Sundays.
A great and prolific artist, Venezuelan-born painter Luchita Hurtado spent the majority of her artistic career largely unrecognized publicly as an artist. Her artistic exploration was deeply personal and examined themes of the body, perception, ancestry, and humankind's relationship to the planet. The Millicent Rogers Museum (MRM) and Taos Abstract Artist Collective (TAAC) are proud to present "Channeling Luchita: A Community Response to the Life and Work of Luchita Hurtado," an exhibition and curatorial response to the work and life of Luchita Hurtado. Curated by Deborah McLean, Claire Motsinger and TAAC artists Bob Parker, and Dani Kamas, this exhibition presents 10 New Mexico artists whose styles and conceptual practices respond to the themes conjured in Hurtado's artistic body of work. Conceived as a response to The Harwood Museum of Art's exhibition "Luchita Hurtado: Earth and Sky Interjected," "Channeling Luchita" is a way for MRM and TAAC to pay homage to an artist who brought so much to the Taos and global community with her years of continual artistic pursuits, and to celebrate the work of contemporary artists who share her devotion.
The artists represented in this exhibition are Lynnette Haozous, Audra Elizabeth Knutson, c marquez, Dean Pulver, Rick Romancito, Josh Tafoya, Margaret R. Thompson, Maya Torres, Tse Tsan, and Olive Tyrrell. Throughout her life, Hurtado sought artistic expression centered around a number of themes. The following themes reflect several of the areas that our artists have spoken to in their works chosen for this exhibition:
Parenthood
Surrealism
Environment
The female gaze
Ritual
Spirituality and mysticism
Each artist chosen for this show was asked to respond to the question, "How do you connect with Luchita or her work in your artistic practice?" Their answers accompany the artworks to share, in the artists' own words, the unique affinity they found in the career of the extraordinary Luchita Hurtado.
This unique collaboration originated through TAAC's partnership with The Harwood Museum of Art through 2024 and 2025 in weaving together multiple webs of the Taos creative community through a series of collaborative events and exhibitions dedicated to the life and work of the late great artist Luchita Hurtado. Channeling Luchita is part of this broader community dialogue linking TAAC, The Harwood Museum of Art and the Millicent Rogers Museum directly with our artist community.
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TAAC promotes abstract artists working in or near Taos, New Mexico, toward the exchange of ideas, new aesthetics and creative concepts. Taos is synonymous with abstract thinking, with origins in indigenous geometries, transcendental and modernist movements, and conceptual and land art installation. Once the nexus for westward bound artists, Taos unleashes expansive, abstract thinkers.
Scenes from Taos Abstract Artist Collective’s Inaugural Exhibition in September of 2022. Save the date for the second annual member exhibition from October 11th - 22nd, 2023 at the Stables Gallery at the Taos Center for the Arts.
TAAC is an inclusive group that amplifies self-identifying abstract artists living and working in Northern New Mexico, honoring our intersecting identities across race, national origin, ethnicity, culture, size, gender identity and expression, disability, sexuality, age, socioeconomic status, neurotype, religion and/or spiritual practice.