Artist Biography & Facts

Lita Albuquerque

Born in Santa Monica, California, she earned a BFA from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1968. She also attended the Otis Art Institute. Her work is widely collected in the Newport Beach and Los Angeles areas. She has been an instructor of art in various California universities and colleges including the Art Center College of Design, the Claremont Graduate School, and the University of California at Irvine. Her residence has been Santa Monica.

Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor.  She is committed to developing a visual language that brings the realities of vast time and space to a more human scale and is widely acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent art works executed in the natural landscape and in public sites.

She was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia, North Africa and in Paris, France.  At the age of eleven she finally settled with her family in the United States.  In the 1970's 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 seventies with her ephemeral pigment installations pertaining to mapping, identity and the cosmos, executed and documented in the natural landscape.  In 1980 Albuquerque garnered international acclaim for her pivotal installation, THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT PROJECT, as featured in the International Sculptural Conference.  The recognition this daring work gained led to awards and commissions at major sites around the world, including the Great Pyramids, where she represented the United States at the International Cairo Biennale with her installation and exhibition SOL STAR which won the prestigious Cairo Biennale Prize.

Completing an ambitious array of public projects over the past decade, Albuquerque has been commissioned to work in locations including: Gannett Publishers in McLean, Virginia; The Evo De Concini Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Arizona; Palos Verdes Central Library, California; Koll/Obayashi Corporation, Los Angeles, CA; Tochigi Prefecture Health Center, Japan; Saitama Guest Center, Saitama, Tokyo, and the Library at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies amongst numerous other sites.

Albuquerque, with architect Mitchell De Jarnett, recently installed the largest public art commission in California state government history, entitled GOLDEN STATE, a plaza design spanning two city blocks at the center of the Capitol Area East End Complex in Sacramento.  Conceived at the scale of the city, this environmental artwork includes an amphitheater, a field of sculptures and an excavation of the undulating landscape.  Last year, Albuquerque completed CELESTIAL DISK, a star map, sculpture and waterfall in collaboration with architect Robert Kramer, which provides the main entrance to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles. She is working with architect Cesar Pelli on a sculptural floor installation for the New Minneapolis Central Library, designing a glass pathway, star map and water wall disk for the Wallace Chapel at Chapman University in Orange County, CA, creating a site-specific work for the California Institute of Technology and was selected to design a public art installation for the North University Branch Library and Nobel Park and Recreation Center in San Diego in 2005.  Her newest ephemeral Earth Art work THE POLE PROJECT, a star map of blue diameters on ice planned for installation at both the North and South Poles for 2006 -2007, will result in an exhibition of artwork, photographs and a documentary film.

She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards including: the Cairo Biennale Prize, at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale; Arts International award for U.S. Artist Representative for the Cairo Biennale; National Endowment for the Arts Art in Public Places Award (1983, 1984, 1990), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship Grant and the esteemed Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Perugia, Italy (2002).  In June 2004 she was honored by the MOCA Los Angeles for their 25th anniversary celebration for her contributions to the museum.  Her work is featured in their anniversary catalogue and permanent collection.

Lita Albuquerque's work is also included in the archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and is collected by prominent museums and Foundations, such as: the WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART, THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES, THE GETTY TRUST, THE FREDEICK WEISMAN FOUNDATION, THE LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM, THE ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM, THE LAGUNA ART MUSEUM, THE PALM SPRINGS DESERT MUSEUM, as well as numerous embassies and corporations, on an extensive world wide basis.

Numerous solo exhibitions include: a career survey at Santa Monica Museum of Art; Mary Ryan Gallery, N.Y.; Dorothy Goldeen Gallery, Santa Monica; Marianne Deson Gallery, Chicago; Diane Brown Gallery, Washington D.C.; Lerner Heller Gallery, N.Y.; Robin Cronin Gallery, Houston; and Akhnaten Galleries, Cairo. Her museum exhibition history includes Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Art; Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris; Asahi Shimbun, Tokyo; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; L.A. County Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A.
Albuquerque's work questions what we are 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. In a dazzling array of work at many scales and in a variety of media, she has worked to develop a visual language capable of bringing the realities of vast space and time to a more human scale.

Albuquerque 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.