A Venezuelan-born immigrant to the United States, Hurtado spent more than 80 years creating paintings and works on paper that explore themes of gender, ecology, the body, and cultural belonging. In her I Am series, begun in the 1960s, she reworked conventions of the nude, choosing to portray her own body from a top-down perspective, showing her breasts, torso, and legs as she perceived them rather than as seen through the eyes of someone else. “This is a landscape, this is the world, this is all you have . . . this is where you live,” she explained, reflecting on her decision to represent herself this way. Her approach challenged the conventions of nude imagery in western art, which typically assumed the vantage point of a man gazing upon a woman’s body. She made this print from the series at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop while living in Los Angeles.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)