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, among others.