Lita Albuquerque
The earth strong behind us, propelling us upward, giving us her strength, throwing us in the air, while we fly, never falling, the fierce intensity of our rhythm while alive, and the freedom of release from the earth.
– Lita Albuquerque
Selected Works
Exhibitions
Selected Press
Pioneering Land Art and Light & Space artist Lita Albuquerque, known for her work in the 1960s and ’70s, presents Turbulence, featuring a boulder coated in ultramarine blue atop decomposed granite. The piece reflects on the fleeting connection between humanity and nature, with blue serving as a link between earth and cosmos, transforming light into matter.
In keeping with Frieze Los Angeles’s deep fascination with its sprawling metropolitan host, this year’s edition of Frieze Projects offers an insider’s glimpse at the city’s cultural topography.
On the festive occasion of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time (PST) project: “Art and Science Collide,” ever-inspired artist Lita Albuquerque debuts her fourth presentation with Michael Kohn Gallery.
A matriarch of the Land Art movement that is closely associated with the American Southwest, Lita Albuquerque has engaged with the surface of Earth from the South Pole to Saudi Arabia, Peru to Paris.
Lita Albuquerque’s fourth exhibition at the Michael Kohn Gallery utilizes white color pigments to honor the experience of light-reflecting materials in nature, like salt and snow.
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.
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.
About the Artist
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal.
She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. Albuquerque has also been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist Grant Program for the artwork, Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the 2019 Laguna Art Museum Wendt Artist of the Year Award, and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.
Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland; Desert X 2017; 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art; The Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.
Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA, among others. A dedicated educator, Albuquerque has held many teaching appointments during her tenure, and was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.
