Lita Albuquerque
American, born 1946
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, 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. She is on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design.
Person TypeIndividual
