Night Veils - 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. Since the early 1970s she has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to grand site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Albuquerque has been associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, and is known for her unique visual and conceptual language, utilizing the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illustrate human identity as part of a larger universal identity.

She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale, where she was awarded the Biennale’s top prize. She 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, as well as three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award. 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.  Her work is in the collections of the MOMA, the Getty Trust, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA and MOCA.

Recent exhibitions include Desert X AlUla, Saudi Arabia (2020); Lita Albuquerque: Red Earth, Huntington Botanical Gardens and Art Museum, San Marino, CA (2020); Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark (2021); Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte (2022); Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2023); Lita Albuquerque: Early Works, Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels, Belgium (2024); and Lita Albuquerque: Stellar Axis, Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2024). Upcoming exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Malibu Line, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles and Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Initiative. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Trust, Los Angeles, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.