She moved to New York City at the age of nine, later going on to study painting at Washington Irving High School. Her first husband was a Spanish journalist by the name of Daniel de Solar, who she married at the age of 18; he was twice her age at the time. It was through him that she was introduced to many Latin writers and painters, such as Rufino Tamayo. However, by 1942, with two young children, the two were prepared to divorce; according to Hurtado, "this man apparently went on doing this: wait 'til the wife has two sons and then leave her for someone else." Shortly after he left, in 1945, she made the painting that is recognized as the first in her career, and began freelance illustration and painting work. Her early career was as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast and as a muralist for Lord & Taylor. During this time, her circle of fellow artists expanded. One such connection she made was with Ailes Gilmour, who had roomed with Hurtado and de Solar when they were still married. Gilmour was the half-sister of Isamu Noguchi, and so Noguchi and Hurtado became close, often visiting galleries together. It was through Noguchi that Hurtado was introduced to her second husband, the artist and collector Wolfgang Paalen, and after they married, her connections to other artists expanded even more rapidly than before. She lived and traveled in Mexico with Paalen, encountering Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, and Edward James. However, upon her five-year-old son Pablo dying from polio, Hurtado felt she needed a new environment, so she moved to San Francisco in 1948. There, her contacts with artists and collectors included Gordon Onslow Ford, Jacqueline Johnson, Lucienne Bloch, James Broughton, Rene d'Harnoncourt, Robert Motherwell, Giles Healey, and Sheila Healey. This was also when she met Lee Mullican, who would later become her third husband following her leaving Paalen in 1950. The two then lived happily together for the next 48 years, having two sons together, each of them working on their own art. Their son Matt Mullican is a New York-based artist, and their son John Mullican is a Los Angeles-based writer and director. Following Lee's death in 1998, Matt moved to L.A. to handle the estate of his father, along with other curators. While there, they uncovered many paintings signed "LH" that were not recognized as Lee's work; from there, they made their way to the hands of Paul Soto, founder of Park View, a two-year-old apartment gallery a few blocks from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, and her first solo gallery exhibition since 1974 was held there. Christopher Knight said of her work: "Her drawings’ loosely Surrealist forms recall dense pictographs from a variety of cultures, ancient and modern. Among them are prehistoric cave paintings, Northwest and Southwest tribal art, pre-Columbian reliefs and the abstract paintings and sculptures." Hurtado's work was included in the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A. exhibition in 2018. Several visitors asked the curators if her birth date was incorrect because the work seems so contemporary. "There’s no way, said the visitor, that a painter by the name of Luchita Hurtado could have possibly been born in 1920." Hurtado's work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
