PHOTOGRAPH BY TODD WEAVER
THE ARTIST LITA ALBUQUERQUE’S PATH has taken her to the ends of the Earth — from a convent in Tunisia to the pyramids of Egypt; from the salt flats of Bolivia to the polar ice shelf of Antarctica, where she spent over a month in residence at a space station. In these and other far-flung locales, she has investigated the relationship between humans and the cosmos through art, science, spirituality and myth. Whether designing a monumental earthwork meant to be viewed from the sky or channeling a celestial message through writing, she aims to tap into things bigger than we are.
Even in light of that, perhaps the most life-altering experience of the artist’s 78 years was something that happened in her own backyard, literally. The 2018 Woolsey Fire raged across 100,000 acres in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, killing three people and destroying nearly 1,600 structures, including Albuquerque’s family home, along with her studio, library and an archive intended for the Smithsonian, which were all reduced to ash.
In the six years since that parched November day when the Santa Anas fanned the flames as they howled through the hills, Albuquerque has grieved, healed and rebuilt. The fire’s lessons continue to unfurl for her, but she has never stopped asking — and answering — the great cosmic questions through art. The answers take innumerable forms but they always lead her back to the here and now.
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On an early August morning, Lita Albuquerque is in her Downtown LA art studio, standing amidst a series of large blue paintings and feather-light samples of gold leaf, contemplating a rectangle on the floor. She is busy making work for her current solo show, Earth Skin, at Michael Kohn Gallery in Hollywood, and thinking about how to “bring the awareness of the earth to an indoor space.” The perfectly formed rectangle is made of a fine layer of decomposed granite Albuquerque applied to the concrete. It is only as deep as a grain of sand, a membrane meant to recall the surface we stand upon and how, like our own skin, “the tiniest molecular difference can separate things from one another.”
By playing with visual perception and demanding the viewer’s awareness, Albuquerque highlights the impact we all have without even thinking about it — a concept partially inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s ideas about “Spaceship Earth” and our common fate. “It’s our shared experience, it’s what we exist on, but we don’t pay attention to it,” she says, adding, “I’m hoping people won’t step on it.”
This installation and the accompanying series of tactile, motion-filled paintings have an environmental counterpart in Malibu Line, which Albuquerque presented earlier this summer and will be showing again at the end of September in conjunction with Earth Skin. A new iteration of her first-ever ephemeral earthwork from 1978 — a vibrant blue trench in the earth, packed with the ultramarine pigment that has become her signature material — 2024’s Malibu Line marked the artist’s official return to the family property.
Albuquerque debuted the new piece to friends, family and adventurous art lovers on a hot Sunday afternoon in June, a few days after the Summer Solstice. Produced by the local arts nonprofit Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) with the independent Tunisian-American curator Ikram Lakhdhar, the 68-foot channel extends from the green-and-gold canyons that zigzag to the sea. As the sun deepened, the ultramarine line only got brighter, winking and fluorescing against the brush.
When Albuquerque made the original Malibu Line, she was a young woman living on a 132-acre artists colony, and the work represented a move away from the personal and toward a more universal, artistic vision. “I gave up painting and I decided to go out in the world,” she recalls. “I ended up going into the earth…I would take these walks up the hill and I became very aware of the verticality of my body against the horizon line, which formed a cross. And I thought, that’s interesting, I wonder if that’s how symbols are formed.”
Since that awakening, Albuquerque’s practice has existed firmly at the intersection of the Land Art and Light and Space movements, to the extent that it is virtually a movement unto itself.
In ideating Malibu Line, Albuquerque was awed by a Susan Kaiser Vogel piece from 1977 in which a brick structure painted light blue seemed to melt into the sky. The ultramarine blue of Malibu Line, stretching toward the Pacific, unites earth, sea and heavens; she describes the color as “a fulcrum around which light is perceived.” It is the blue of Earthrise, the indelible image from the 1968 Apollo moon landing that sparked the environmental movement and forever shifted Albuquerque’s consciousness, inspiring visions of the planet covered in gold-tipped pyramids, and shafts of light running through its core. It is also the blue of the doors and windows of Sidi Bou Said, in Tunisia, the North African country on the Mediterranean where Albuquerque spent her childhood. In her work, it has become a symbol of both connection and longing.
The artist and her husband, Carey Peck, redesigned their hilltop home with the Malibu-based firm Apel Design, embracing a philosophy of minimal impact to address the fragility of the ecosystem and incorporating arched doorways and a dome to reflect Tunisia’s Moorish architecture. Though she was born in Santa Monica in 1946, Albuquerque was raised in her mother’s native country and educated in a Catholic convent in Carthage. The family abruptly returned to LA when Albuquerque was 11 — a “rupture” she never fully processed. The Woolsey Fire and the sudden, traumatic loss of another home reopened this old wound. Lakhdhar, who grew up in Tunisia until the age of 18, and visits frequently, recalls that Albuquerque started to cry in their first conversation about their homeland. “I could tell that I mirrored something in her,” she says. “I felt like I kind of held a space for her, and she felt safe with me. This is really powerful for artists who have an identity that has never been seen or reflected.”
Last fall, Albuquerque was featured in the show Groundswell: The Women of Land Art, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and she came to realize that her impulse to work with the land was “a way of attaching myself to the earth, the colors, the natural elements,” of Tunisia. She notes that the late Ana Mendieta, also featured in the Groundswell show, was similarly “ruptured” from Cuba when she was sent to the United States at the age of 12. She too, turned to the land; in Mendieta’s case, she physically connected her body and sometimes inserted herself into the earth, as with her Siloueta series. “It’s interesting that there are relationships [between our work],” says Albuquerque. “This need to be attached to something when you’re taken out like that.”
Albuquerque initially hesitated when Lakhdhar proposed revisiting Malibu Line as a way to “reorient Lita’s work toward Tunisia” — a literal line to invoke her maternal lineage. But the Groundswell show and a recent Brussels exhibition of early works showed her that the art world might be, as the curator puts it, “ready for women who have different backgrounds and different stories, who are bold and revolutionary.” Albuquerque agreed, on the condition that a “sister line” from Tunisia would symbolically extend across the planet to meet it. Plans are underway for this to be realized next year.
Albuquerque tells me she was surprised at how healing the whole process had been: making the piece, pressing the pigment into the earth with her hands, and then spending two full days on the land while over 500 people came to view it. “I hadn’t spent that kind of time since the fire, I hadn’t spent the whole day. So that really was this sweet kind of homecoming.”
At the end of the Sunday viewing, about a dozen of us gather in a circle on a stone patio built by Peck. Among the guests are Lakhdhar, LAND Executive Director Laura Hyatt, Albuquerque’s husband, and her two artist daughters, Isabelle and Jasmine, a dancer and choreographer who is her mother’s muse and collaborator. The patio is a special spot — Peck built it for Isabelle’s wedding — and it’s one of the only places on the property that was spared in the Woolsey Fire. Bringing things full circle, Jasmine, who was eight months pregnant at the time of the fire and the only person at the house when the evacuation order came in (she escaped with the family dog, some journals, and some of her mother’s hard drives), is pregnant again. Her first child, now five, gleefully runs around the property.
Albuquerque asks the guests to join hands and opens a simple meditation. “It is Sunday, June 23rd, at 6:35 p.m.,” she begins. “Twelve people are standing on a hillside in Malibu, in LA County, in the state of California.” She then takes us beyond the country and the Northern Hemisphere, to space, where Earth is “the third planet from our Sol Star, nestled in the Orion arm of our Milky Way Galaxy,” all the way to the multitudinous galaxies of the super great cluster of Laniakea (a Hawaiian term that means immense heaven) and then back down again, where we stand with our feet on the ground.
This recitation, known among astronomers as the “cosmic address,” is something that Albuquerque has engaged in daily (often multiple times a day) for decades, as a way of locating herself in time and space. “It puts you in the reality,” she says. “It takes us right into what is happening if you think of us as an object in space — which we are — part of this galaxy and the complex system of billions of galaxies. It brings that perspective into the present moment.”
In fact, during my visit to her studio, she leads us through the same recitation. Of course, this time we land in Downtown LA, “two women, sitting in a brick building.” As she says, “it’s not metaphysics; it’s physics.”
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This month (and ongoing into February 2025), the Getty launches its next Pacific Standard Time initiative, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, which features more than 70 exhibitions and programs across Southern California. The collision of art and science is a theme that feels designed for Albuquerque, who in addition to the solo show Earth Skin, is making a site-specific piece for Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 on the Pasadena campus of Caltech, where Albert Einstein famously spent time in the 1920s and ‘30s with astronomers Edwin Hubble and George Ellery Hale. She will also be featured in Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990, at the Palm Springs Art Museum, which will honor her at its January fundraising gala.
A recent article in the science and culture journal Nautilus, titled “Magic Died When Art and Science Split,” tells of a “great divorce” in the late 19th century — a schism between art and science, which had previously been sister disciplines. Linking this to the 19th-century German sociologist Max Weber’s theory of “disenchantment,” defined as “the belief that everything in the natural world can be known and mastered and that mystery, reverence, and other emotions have no place in scientific thought,” author Renee Bergland makes a strong case for reunion and re-enchantment in the 21st century.
It’s easy to see how separating our human relationship to nature from intuition and wonder benefits any society that relies on upholding false power structures. When one is in tune with nature, one understands interdependence, community and the inherent value of every living thing — none of which support capitalism or the patriarchy.
Heather MacDonald, senior program officer of the Getty Foundation, echoes these ideas when speaking about the PST ART initiative. “The separateness of art and science — their alienation from one another — has always been a myth of modernity,” she says. “Perhaps today there is a new openness to looking at art and science concerning one another because researchers across many scientific disciplines have become interested in looking to adjacent fields, ancestral knowledge, or futurist approaches to solve some of the most intractable and urgent problems facing us today.”
In the wake of the pandemic, divisive politics and the ongoing climate crises, we’ve seen a keen hunger for re-enchantment and connection with the universal. In the art world, 18th- and 19th-century women artists like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton have captivated modern museum-goers with work that is both spiritual and deeply attuned to the natural world. Pelton painted most of her luminous skyscapes after meditating for hours under the desert stars, and af Klint brought her lifelong love of botany, as well as a knowledge of astronomy and astrology, into her geometric abstractions.
What Pelton, af Klint, and Albuquerque share is the ability to interpret the universe in a way that feels familiar and yet also invites wonder. Their work is mystical but rooted in light and color theory, elemental systems, and relationships between planetary bodies and the natural world: in other words, the physics of our reality.
“I think in my case, I just wouldn’t let go of being enchanted,” says Albuquerque, sitting in her studio. “When I was getting into the art field, you didn’t talk about anything personal, you didn’t talk about spirituality, but I always held on to that. Maybe this is the moment, when we are letting go of the colonial, the religion, and we are beginning to understand that re-enchantment. Maybe that’s why we are seeing this interest in the intersection of art and science.” She gestures around the room. “The root of the word for art is techne, in Greek. Everything here is technical; it’s all about materials and the specificity of applying materials. But then there’s the human who comes in and brings the poetry.”
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Albuquerque’s astonishing 2006 installation Stellar Axis, the subject of a recent immersive exhibition at Stanford University, still stands as her most scientifically rigorous project to date. She mounted the installation during the five weeks she spent in Antarctica as an artist in residence at the McMurdo Space Station in December 2006 and January 2007. Not only were the conditions harsh and exacting — Antarctica is one of the last untouched places on the earth’s surface, and as such, the responsibility to “leave no trace” was great — but Albuquerque’s intent to map the 99 brightest stars on the ice was more than conceptual or aesthetic. Of course, the ultramarine blue spheres she envisioned would stand in stunning contrast to the vast whiteness of the environment, but there was also a plan to make spheres of different sizes to distinguish the stars by magnitude, starting with the brightest, Sirius, continuing to recognizably mythic names like Canopus and Antares, and ending with the obscure: Girtab, Aludra, Zaurak and many others.
“She wanted it to be a true reflection, to literally bring the sky down to the earth,” recalls Simon Balm, a British astrophysicist based in LA whom Albuquerque enlisted to help with the GPS mapping and the production and installation of the ecologically sound fiberglass spheres. “She could have quite easily made up some random pattern, but she wanted this to be authentic from a science basis…That was important to her.”
Balm had spent long periods in the Antarctic, designing, building and installing a radio telescope at the South Pole, but he says that Albuquerque’s artistic perspective opened his mind in unexpected ways. “You could look at this installation from the scientific perspective as a bunch of fiberglass spheres painted blue and stuck in the ice…but when you worked on it and when you experienced it, you felt something.” Furthermore, he notes that scientists are equally as capable of awe as artists. “Knowing that a star is a huge ball of hydrogen and helium gas undergoing nuclear fusion does not in any way change the way that you feel when you look up at all the stars in the dark night sky.”
In December, daylight lasts for 24 hours at the South Pole, and it was the light itself that inspired wonder in Albuquerque. I still remember a conversation I had with her in 2014, on the occasion of another exhibition and the publication of the monograph, Lita Albuquerque: Stellar Axis, when she described the exhilaratingly pristine environment. “The particles of light were so pure that it felt like they went right into your system and transformed you,” she said. “Everybody asked me, did you get lonely? Not once! I didn’t miss anything or anyone. It was very strange.” (Returning home and stepping off the plane in LA, on the other hand, was like “coming into a soup,” she recalled.)
After the installation was complete, Albuquerque organized a celebration of the longest day of the year, leading the residents of the base in their official red parkas into an Archimedean spiral formation within the star pattern, which stretched 400 feet across. Balm noticed how the participants reacted to Stellar Axis. “It was almost like they were walking into a sacred space,” he says. “If you’ve ever visited Stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt [both, it is worth noting, astronomical in nature], there’s a reverence you feel. It was really interesting to see how people responded to it. Some people were very playful [as they approached], but they were not the same when they went into it. They changed.”
Balm, too, felt changed. “After this experience,” he says, “I think art and science are inspired by the same thing. They’re inspired by our existence, the big questions: Why are we here? What does it mean?… And I think this is what Lita does. She bridges science and art and fuses it together, and what you get is something that’s greater than either.”
In an essay from the Stellar Axis monograph, Dallas-based Professor Roger F. Malina categorizes Albuquerque’s practice within the rubric of “‘intimate science,’ or, how we bring into actual aesthetic and cognitive experience understandings that we now have of the cosmos, understandings that are beyond human sensory experience.”
Since she made Sol Star, her first terrestrial star map, in 1996—99 circles, created with three tons of blue pigment, in front of the Pyramids of Giza, Albuquerque’s intention has always been to channel and transmit information from the stars about life and creation. After all, we are, as Carl Sagan memorably said, “made of starstuff” (but not before Joni Mitchell proclaimed that “we are stardust”), and when we deepen our connection with the cosmos and the planet, it helps us evolve. As Albuquerque points out, the stars we currently see in the sky are no longer there, which means that ancient knowledge and time are somehow within us, too.
These are alchemical concepts, and there is a tendency to dismiss or disparage alchemy — commonly defined as the transmutation of a lesser metal into gold — as occult pseudoscience or just plain greed. But we can also choose to understand it as a metaphor for the refinement of the self or the soul. When Albuquerque uses gold in her work, it’s a symbol of transmutation; however, because gold is (and all heavy metals are) created by the nucleosynthesis of supernovae, it is also, molecularly, a manifestation of cosmic energy itself.
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In the fictional character of Najma, a 25th-century astronaut who has returned to Earth to help humans remember their connection to the stars, Albuquerque has found an avatar for a new mythology. Her daughter Jasmine has brought this astronaut to life in film, performance and form. To this day, life-sized, ultramarine blue sculptures of Najma can be found around the world: one lies on a mountaintop in Switzerland with her ear to the ground, and another sits in meditation in a hidden valley in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, where Albuquerque participated in the 2020 edition of the roving art exhibition Desert X.
Curator Elizabeta Betinski has worked with Albuquerque and this body of work in several iterations. In 2017, she was executive director of Desert X when Albuquerque presented a performance at Sunnylands for its inaugural edition, and in 2021, Betinski’s nonprofit, bardoLA, presented the world premiere of Albuquerque’s film Liquid Light, as a collateral event of the Venice Biennale.
The raw footage, shot by cinematographer David McFarland in La Paz, Bolivia, and on the otherworldly Uyuni salt flats, was on the hard drives Jasmine rescued from the Woolsey fire. The finished film, part two in a proposed trilogy, is breathtakingly beautiful but unsettling, as Najma struggles to connect with humanity. In the end, Albuquerque herself appears, as a mirror/mother figure, and the healing process begins. Throughout the Biennale, the film was played on a loop in a site-specific installation where blown glass spheres filled with honey and water dotted the floor, and golden orbs lay on a bed of salt. Again, Albuquerque left the alchemical breadcrumbs, but the viewer must choose to follow.
Najma also welcomed visitors to the Groundswell show, striding through the lobby of the Nasher museum — a “guardian of the Earth,” per her title. A New York Times reviewer was somewhat flippant about the character’s “operatic backstory” but then she gushed that “Albuquerque’s way with color enchants” — a notable word choice in this context. The fact is, Albuquerque treats Najma’s mission and messages seriously, however fanciful some might find the container.
“If you think of art as inspiring on a more holistic level — not just the brain, not just making you think, that’s where Lita’s strength is,” says Betinski. “She approaches art-making in a more feeling way. It’s not, ‘let me think about this.’ It’s, ‘let me intuit this.’” Betinski suggests this may be a more effective way of engaging with the big questions. “Science doesn’t explain why we’re here,” she continues. “I don’t think you have the room to contemplate those things unless you have art as a vessel to go down that river.”
There is also a fierceness to Albuquerque’s vision and a baseline of courage. She is unafraid to engage with systems of power and to stake an energetic claim and say, I belong here. In past participatory art pieces, she convened groups of hundreds of people to walk in procession along the beach, or descend a hillside to meet up with a skydiver falling to earth. She tells me that choosing the grounds of Sunnylands (the one-time home of Walter and Leonore Annenberg) for the 2017 Desert X performance piece hEARTH was an intentional decision. “I chose that site because in studying it, I saw it was like a Camp David of the West, where heads of state would come,” she says. “I liked the idea of putting a different kind of power, a cosmic power, in a place of political power.”
This same impulse was behind her 1980 work, Monument Project/Red Pyramid, an environmental piece on the National Mall that traced the shadow of the Washington Monument as it fell in the North, East and West (the South, apparently, is in a marsh). This pyramid-topped obelisk stands 555 feet tall, and Albuquerque’s red pigment chevrons turned an homage to our first president into a giant sundial, drawing attention to planetary motion and the speed at which we are rotating around the sun. I find it fascinating and funny that the piece was only “perfect” for a few seconds a day. “Shadows don’t stop,” Albuquerque says with a smile.
While Red Pyramid wasn’t politically motivated, times have changed. Albuquerque recently had a conversation with a major Washington, D.C. institution about the possibility of revisiting the piece, and she is excited precisely because of our current political climate. “It could have another life.”
Betinski isn’t at all surprised that the spotlight has landed on Albuquerque. “Considering the urgency of the climate crisis and the collective need to reimagine our relationship with our planet, it makes sense to me that this is Lita’s moment, even though I believe it should have come 20 years ago.”
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Today, Albuquerque is more vital than ever. She still swims in the ocean daily, and, having retired last year after 39 years of teaching at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, is unphased by the commute from Malibu to Downtown. But as of this writing, she is most eagerly anticipating the completion of the new family home by Thanksgiving, and the imminent birth of her new grandchild.
It feels like a fitting tilt of the cosmic fulcrum that once the world finally caught up to her, Albuquerque would balance her inner and outer revolutions with the grounding, primal connections of family and home, and the simple, sensual pleasures of paint on canvas — an artistic return that has taken six years to manifest.
Rebuilding doesn’t come without fear, but she doesn’t feel betrayed by the land, either.
“I mean, how many people haven’t lost?” she asks. “I remember seeing tornado victims…and you go, how can that be?! Their whole house is gone, right? And then to see that that happened to me! But look how many millions of people experience that on some level or another…It is the human experience.”
Albuquerque remembers another fire that tore through Malibu decades ago. “I thought for sure that I had lost my library. I was totally distraught…Then I thought, NO. All that knowledge is in me, and I still have my elemental self. By seeing and accepting what is ephemeral, what never leaves becomes clear.”
