Lita Albuquerque

Lita Albuquerque was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia and Paris. 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 paintings pertaining to mapping, identity and the cosmos. Her site-specific artworks have spanned the globe including: the Great Pyramids of Giza, Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, the Arctic Circle, the Saudi Arabian and Mojave deserts and the Washington Monument. She was winner of the sixth International Cairo Biennale Prize (1996) and a National Science Foundation award for Stellar Axis (2006-2007). Additional honors include: an Arts International award for U.S. artist representative for the Cairo Biennale; three National Endowment for the Arts: Art in Public Places Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in the Visual Arts, Perugia, Italy. Her performance works were presented at: Desert X, Laguna Museum of Art, Mount Wilson Observatory, and the Getty’s Museum Pacific Standard Time Festival. Exhibitions include: Hirschhorn Museum, San Francisco Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Orange County Museum of Art, Musee d’Art Moderne, Paris, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, a career survey at Santa Monica Museum of Art and most recently Light and Space, Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, and Land Art: Expanding the Atlas, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada. She is featured in numerous public and private collections internationally, including: the Getty Trust, LACMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art NY and LA, Museum of Contemporary Art LA, Whitney Museum of Art, the archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and her Stellar Axis archive is held in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Albuquerque is represented by Kohn Gallery and Peter Blake Gallery.