Lita Albuquerque
LITA ALBUQUERQUE
Born in Santa Monica, California in 1946, Lita Albuquerque was raised in Tunisia, North Africa and Paris, returning to California at age twelve. After receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, her studies continued at Otis College of Art and Design. In the 1970s, she emerged within the Land Art and California’s Light and Space movement, and early in her practice was acclaimed for the ontological and philosophical complexities of her art. Since that time, Albuquerque has forged a distinctive path through the personal and mythological cosmology that drives her multidisciplinary, often collaborative, practice. In 2022, Albuquerque’s Liquid Light, a triptych video installation and immersive sculpture exhibition was presented by bardoLA and featured as a collateral event at the 59th Venice Biennale, Biennale Arte.
In 1978, Albuquerque created a land work titled, Malibu Line, in which she filled a trench measuring 41-feet by 14-inches with ultramarine blue powdered pigment. Sited on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the blue line metaphorically conjoined earth and sky, inviting the concept of a universal canvas for Albuquerque. Its ephemeral nature would presage the expansive evolution of her creative process and a visual language that crisscrosses science and technology, the sublime, identity, and timelessness. Albuquerque’s global public projects, installations, performances, and exhibitions have taken her to Egypt, India, Death Valley, Antarctica, Saudi Arabia, Bolivia, the North Pole, the Mojave Desert, and across Europe and the United States.
In 2006, with an international team of artists and scientists, she created a large-scale work on the continent of Antarctica titled Stellar Axis: Antarctica. Consisting of 99 ultramarine blue spheres installed on the Ross ice shelf, the placement of each sphere was aligned to specific stars and constellations in the Southern Hemisphere sky. Drawing on ancient myths and futuristic narratives, her transcendent works reveal a consciousness that is at once celestial and earthly, touching on a cosmic universality. A monograph was published on the groundbreaking work by the Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art + the Environment.
Lita Albuquerque has been the recipient of the National Science Foundation Artist and Writers Grant Program; three NEA Art in Public Places awards; an NEA Individual Fellowship grant; a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship; and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award, and others. Her art is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Getty Trust, NY and CA; Whitney American Museum of Art, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, CA; and The Nevada Museum of Art, NV, among others. She is a core faculty member of the Fine Art Graduate Program at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA.
Lita Albuquerque was filmed in her Los Angeles studio on November 17, 2022.
“In 1975, I was in the Metropolitan Museum, and I walked by a sarcophagus and heard the words, ‘pay attention to the feet.’ And I thought, ‘okay,’ and I wrote it down. A year and a half later, I looked at my notebook and I thought, ‘Pay attention to the feet? Ground? Ah, Earth! Pay attention to the Earth.’ And that’s when I started doing my ephemeral pieces out in the desert.”
“I lived on 132 acres of land in Malibu overlooking the ocean – it was an artist colony. It was incredible – you could see the curvature of the Earth. I’d never been in a place where I was aware of who we are as a planet, of literally the Earth as a spaceship, as Buckminster Fuller liked to call it. And it was also facing due south, so I could see the seeming motion of the moon and the sun going from east to west every day.”
“Look who we are. We have as ancestral knowledge – da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, to name a few, that’s who we are in our DNA. At this moment, I love to think of all of us as Free-Falling Agents of Change.”
