For a few months in the spring of 2020, Isabelle Albuquerque tried to live like a deer. She spent time here at Griffith Park around dusk, watching as the animals emerged. She ate with them and like them, adopting their diet of only raw vegetables, fruits and nuts, including a lot of grass.

The evening of November 7, 2018, Lita Albuquerque had plans to see a performance of Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha” at the L.A. Opera with her husband, Carey Peck. He offered to make a night of it with a downtown staycation. “We never do that,” Albuquerque says. “At first, I said, ‘Oh, no, I’m too busy.’ But then I thought, ‘I’m being a real ass.’ ”

A new site-specific artwork by Lita Albuquerque, “Red Earth,” greets visitors at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens as garden areas reopen after a closure of more than three months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally scheduled to go on view in March, the temporary installation centers around a boulder capped with bright red pigment placed among towering bamboo in a grove of the Japanese Garden.

Buddhist teacher and author Stephen Batchelor and artist Lita Albuquerque discuss their views on life, death, and the concept of impermanence with KCRW host Jonathan Bastian. This interview has been abbreviated and edited for clarity.

Desert X, a land art exhibition, first launched in 2017 in the Coachella Valley. It appeared again in 2019. Then its director, Neville Wakefield, announced a new location for 2020: Al Ula, a magnificent desert-scape and UNESCO World Heritage site in Saudi Arabia.

Seated atop a big anamorphous rock in AlUla, an ancient oasis in the Medina region of Saudi Arabia, is an electric blue sculpture of a woman seated in the meditative yogic position called “lotus.” Her legs are crossed while her hands extend out with her palms open on either knee. Her eyes are closed as she connects with the silence and nature that surrounds her.

For DesertX, Lita Albuquerque chose to work at The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands Center & Gardens because of its history as a gathering place. An oasis within the desert, Sunnylands perhaps is best known as the Camp David of the West, frequently hosting Presidential vacations, retreats and summits

Part Kubrickian, part Wilsonian (as in Robert), with a nod to Isadora Duncan, Lita Albuquerque’s “hEARTH,” a performance installation created with her daughter Jasmine Albuquerque and composer Kristen Toedtman, on view at Sunnylands Center and Gardens (the former Annenberg Estate in Rancho Mirage), served as a kind of prequel to outdoor exhibition Desert X 2017.

Artist Lita Albuquerque once told an interviewer her approach to art “begins with nature and who we are in relationship to it. I am continually asking questions about who we are in relationship to the environment around us and to the planet itself.”

At one point in the bright, mantric hour-long performance ritual which christened Lita Albuquerque’s current sculptural installation hEARTH at the Sunnylands Center & Gardens in Rancho Mirage, a throaty clarion chant rang out across the great lawn, staccato: Got to, got to, got to, got to listen to the silence. Why did you come here? Why do you listen? What does it say to you? In many ways, these are the foundational questions and the essential directive of the entire Desert X affair.