Land Art Week Artist Talk: Lita Albuquerque

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is thrilled to inaugurate the first Land Art Week with an artist talk featuring Lita Albuquerque. With a practice encompassing sculpture, site-specific installation, and ephemeral projects, Albuquerque made important contributions to the Light and Space and Land art movements in the 1970s. Her ongoing work continues to engage with these themes, using the body, earth, time, and motion to reveal our place in the universe.

(image courtesy of the artist)

Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA; raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate human consciousness and our position within the universe. 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: Antarctica, which culminated in the first and largest ephemeral artwork created on that continent.

Recent major exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Earth Skin, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Lita Albuquerque: The Washington Monument Project: The Red Pyramid, presented by Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Offscreen, Paris; Lita Albuquerque: Malibu Line, Los Angeles Nomadic Division; Crossing Over: Caltech and Visual Culture, 1920 - 2020, California Institute of Technology, Getty PST, Pasadena, CA; Lita Albuquerque: Early Works at Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach, Brussels; Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light presented by bardoLA at 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Arte 2022; Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark; Desert X AlUla 2020, Saudi Arabia; and the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland. 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. Upcoming exhibitions include Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Land at the Palm Springs Art Museum as well as a site-specific installation at High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California.