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Lita Albuquerque at Giza Pyramids, 1996
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BIOGRAPHY

Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist and writer. She has developed a visual language that brings the realities of time and space to a human scale and is acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent art works executed in the landscape and public sites.

She was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia, North Africa and Paris, France. At the age of eleven she settled with her family in the U.S. In the 1970s Albuquerque emerged on the California art scene as part of the Light and Space movement and won acclaim for her epic and poetic ephemeral pigment pieces created for desert sites. She gained national attention in the late 1970s with her ephemeral pigment installations pertaining to mapping, identity and the cosmos, executed in the natural landscape.​

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, 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 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, Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia, Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, and Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022. 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. The Stellar Axis archive in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. 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 35 years.​

Albuquerque’s work questions our place in the enormity of infinite space and eternal time. Despite a rising flood of new data and interpretive theory, the most elemental concepts of an emerging scientific cosmology are simply not imbedded in everyday culture. Conversely, the meaning of this cosmology does not seem implicit in the science. Lita Albuquerque has not flinched from the scale of such a challenge.  She is one of the rare artists and humanists who are responsible for thoughtfully and imaginatively placing the elemental concepts for a living, functional cosmology for 21st century culture within public consciousness.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cover of 20/20: Accelerando catalog
Cover of Stellar Axis book
Cover of AOR exhibition catalog

Lita Albuquerque:

20/20: Accelerando, 2016

texts by Lita Albuquerque, Selma Holo, and Grant Johnson.

published by USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.

view online

Lita Albuquerque: 

Stellar Axis, 2014

texts by Lita Albuquerque, William Fox, Selma Holo, Roger Malina and Ann Wolfe.

published by Rizzoli and The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada.

download pdf excerpt

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AOR Lita Albuquerque At the Fredrick R. Weisman Museum of Art, 2006

texts by Lita Albuquerque, Jon Beasley, Chandler McWilliams and Michael Zakian.

published by Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA.

Cover of As Above So Below catalog.
Cover of Sol Star catalog.
Cover of Reflections catalog.

As Above So Below: Art As Political And Cosmological Space, 2004

In collaboration with Mitchell DeJarnett

Texts by Howard Fox and Mike McGee.

Published by California State University, Fullerton, CA.

Sol Star Sixth International Cairo Biennale 1996

Texts by Lita Albuquerque, Rosetta Brooks, and Dextra Frankel.

Download pdf excerpt

Lita Albuquerque: Reflections, 1990

Texts by Henry Hopkins and Jan Butterfield.

 

Published by Santa Monica Museum of Art and Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Download pdf excerpt

Cover of Landscape as Thought catalog.
Cover of Abhasa catalog.

Lita Albuquerque, Richard Misrach: Landscape as Thought, 1989

Essays by Jan Butterfield.

Published by Art Gallery, California State University, Fullerton, CA.

Abhasa: Image-Bearing Light, 1983

In collaboration with Robert Kramer and Harold Budd, Fisher Art Gallery, University of Southern California.

Texts by Selma Holo, Kathleen Howe, and Robert Smith.

Published by Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art.

Bibliography
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