Panel Discussion: Luchita Hurtado & The Woman’s Building

On the occasion of ‘Luchita Hurtado. Yo Soy,’ join us for a panel discussion focusing on Hurtado’s first solo exhibition in 1974 at the Woman’s Building, an arts center that played a key role in feminist art and arts education in Los Angeles for over 20 years.

Moderated by Johanna Burton, Maurice Marciano Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, the panel will include environmental artist and activist Lauren Bon, artist Lucy Bull and conceptual artist Nancy Buchanan, who exhibited at the Woman’s Building and whose work is currently on view at The Brick. The panel will explore the impact of the Woman’s Building and the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists; Hurtado’s Linear Language series and her 1974 exhibition; and the legacy of the 1970s feminist movement in art today.

This event is free to attend, however, reservations are recommended.

Following the panel discussion, stay for KCRW’s Summer Nights with DJs spinning from 5 – 10 pm in the courtyard. Learn more.

About the panelists

is an American environmental artist and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web.

Part of a global art cohort addressing our current environmental crisis, Bon uses living systems and infrastructure to create durational, large-scale, place-based projects, and performance, photography and sound to activate these works and engage her audiences. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bon has carved out a space between land art, conceptual art, and transmission art. Her questioning of the status quo and persistent alteration of civic infrastructure demonstrates the power of artists to provoke change and shape opinion through soft diplomacy.

is a conceptual artist working in various forms: performance, video, installations, drawings, and mixed-media work. She was a founding member of F Space Gallery, and showed at the Los Angeles Woman's Building, continuing feminist support work as a member of Double X.

Buchanan's work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou, and the Getty Research Institute (where her papers and video are archived). Buchanan is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist grants, a COLA grant, and a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media. Buchanan is represented by Charlie James Gallery.

is known for her paintings of synesthetic fields of shape and color. The paintings are described in sonic, tactile, or even emotional terms that evade rational logic and are unique to each viewer. She has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL (2024–2025); The Warehouse, Dallas, TX (2023); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China (2023); Pond Society (with Guo Fengyi), Shanghai, China (2021). Her work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; MAMCO Geneva (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain), Switzerland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Bull lives and works between Los Angeles and New York.

Johanna Burton is the Maurice Marciano Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles since 2021. Burton has curated major thematic exhibitions such as “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and Weapon” (2017) at the New Museum, and “Take it or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology” (2014) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, along with major monographic exhibitions with artists including Jeffrey Gibson, Simone Leigh, Sherrie Levine, and Haim Steinbach. She served as series editor for the New Museum’s Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture (2015–2020), edited the October Files book devoted to Cindy Sherman (2006), and penned catalogue essays for artists including Carol Bove, Wade Guyton, Rachel Harrison, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly, and Sable Elyse Smith, among many others. She was a 2019 Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL) Fellow and currently serves as a Trustee on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

About the exhibition

Over the course of her eight-decade career, Venezuelan-born, Los Angeles-based artist Luchita Hurtado (1920 – 2020) committed to a lifelong journey of personal and artistic evolution defined by ceaseless experimentation. The first exhibition devoted to the artist at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles, ‘Yo Soy’ (I Am) brings together paintings and drawings from a pivotal moment in Hurtado’s career: Inspired by the surge of feminist activism in LA, the artist held her first solo exhibition at the Woman’s Building in February 1974, debuting her Linear Language series of expressive, geometric word paintings. A half century on, ‘Yo Soy’ revisits that landmark presentation and includes never-before-seen works from the series it introduced. Through her vibrant, abstract canvases—some cut up and meticulously resewn—visitors will be able to experience the depth of Hurtado’s exploration of pattern, mysticism, the earth and the cosmos.

Caption: Members of the Los Angeles Council of Women Artists, clockwise from top left: Alexis Smith, Ann McCoy, Barbara Haskell, Janice Brown, Avilda Moses, Barbara Munger, Lois Miller, Susan Titelman, Vija Celmins, Luchita Hurtado, Los Angeles CA, 1971

—

Please be advised that photographs will be taken at this event for use on the Hauser & Wirth website, social media and in other marketing materials.

Host or Publisher Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles