At 80, artist Lita Albuquerque is queen of the desert with two new shows

Artist Lita Albuquerque walks through the Malibu home she and her husband, writer Carey Peck, moved into just weeks ago. White walls and broad windows keep the mountains and ocean in view, while a blue door opens onto an entryway capped by a 24-karat gold-leaf dome. Below, a circle of polished black granite set within green marble mirrors the dome — a reference to Albuquerque’s 1989 public artwork, “Site, Memory, Reflection,” and to the architecture of her Tunisian childhood.

The house took eight years to build on the property where the couple’s previous home burned during the 2018 Woolsey fire, along with Albuquerque’s studio, archive and many of her paintings.

The home’s dissolving interior boundary suits an artist who has spent her career questioning where humans fit within the vastness of space and time. Albuquerque, 80, describes her work as examining the limits of human perception and asking what lies beyond.

But she is not dwelling on what was lost.

“Now I don’t even think about the fire — I mean, at all,” she said. “Look at this,” she added, gesturing around her. “It is such a different life, and I’m so ecstatic about it.”

Artist Lita Albuquerque at home in Malibu. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) Albuquerque has much to look forward to. On Friday, a survey of her work, “Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Land,” opens at the Palm Springs Art Museum. And on Nov. 14, her installation “The Interval Between Things” opens at A–Z West in Joshua Tree — artist Andrea Zittel’s 80-acre compound that now serves as the headquarters of High Desert Test Sites, a nonprofit presenting experimental, site-specific art.

Other projects are also underway. Albuquerque’s painting “Visible Light” (2026) will appear in “80s,” a group exhibition opening Nov. 7 at Des Artistes in Culver City, and she is beginning a project for the Powder Art Foundation at Powder Mountain in Utah.

The documentary ‘Asco: Without Permission’ premieres on PBS on Oct. 2. It follows the ‘70s and ‘80s East L.A. revolutionary art group Asco and the next generation of L.A. Chicano artists.

Albuquerque was born in Santa Monica but raised in Tunisia and Paris, returning to California with her family at age 11. She emerged in the California art world during the 1970s, associated with the Light and Space movement, which explored perception through light and the surrounding environment. She also became a pioneering figure in land art, which used the landscape as both site and material.

Her practice has long spanned painting, film and performance, using movement, gesture and culture to explore the body’s relationship to the landscape — and space. Whether spreading pigment across the desert floor, choreographing participants into a living drawing or appearing in her own films, Albuquerque brings a human presence into environments whose scale can dwarf it.

Artist Lita Albuquerque in Malibu in a home that was built again after the first one burned in the 2018 Woolsey fire. (Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times) She found the language that would help define her work with “Malibu Line” (1978), for which she filled a trench along a coastal bluff with ultramarine pigment. The ephemeral piece introduced an approach she would carry into the desert, using intense color to connect the scale of the human body with the immensity of earth and sky. That inquiry eventually took her far beyond California: In 2006, she led a team of artists, scientists and other specialists to Antarctica to create “Stellar Axis,” positioning 99 blue spheres on the Ross Ice Shelf to correspond with stars above.

Hannah Grossman, co-director of High Desert Test Sites, sees Albuquerque’s physical engagement with the landscape as a distinguishing feature of her practice. Grossman noted that she was among the women working in a field whose history has long been dominated by men.

“20/20:Accelerando” (2016), video installation. Installed at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in 2016. (USC Fisher Museum of Art) “If you think about who her contemporaries and peers are, there’s something quite radical about her putting her body in so much of that work, especially that early work,” Grossman said. “The work is both very much installation and also very much performance.”

Spanning five decades, the Palm Springs exhibition presents Albuquerque’s multimedia practice through paintings, sculpture, installations and films, including contemporary iterations of earlier works.

Visitors will be greeted at the museum’s entrance by a sculpture of an imagined 25th century female astronaut, “NAJMA Returns (Guardian of the Earth)” (2023). The figure helps introduce the exhibition’s exploration of humanity’s relationship to nature; Albuquerque imagines the character as the maker of her landscape projects and considers her an alter ego.

“Particle Horizon” (2014), video projection. Installed at the Laguna Art Museum in 2014. (Laguna Art Museum) Versions of the astronaut also appear in her films “20/20: Accelerando” (2016) and “Liquid Light” (2022), which will be shown at the museum. Both feature her daughter, dancer and choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque, who also performed in “The Sea Is Within Me,” staged live at Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in 2025.

Astrid Preston, a Santa Monica painter who has known Albuquerque since they attended UCLA in the 1960s, said that the themes and disciplines Albuquerque now combines were present from the beginning.

“She was interested in art and doing very personal things — figure pieces, stars, moons. The cosmos was already there,” Preston said. “And she also had performance, theatrical interests at the time.”

Grossman calls Albuquerque “an artist’s artist,” citing her openness about how she works and her generosity toward other artists.

“Liquid Light” (2022). Video installation. Installed as a Collateral Event for the 59th La Biennale di Venezia Biennale; Arte 2022 at Olivolo in Venice; and at the MAXXI in Rome in 2025. (Ugo Carmeni) “No matter where she’s showing and who she’s showing with, she brings along with her a lot of people who really look to her as a mentor,” Grossman said. “And I think she does that with a lot of grace.”

A carousel of 135 slides dating from 1976 to 1996 will accompany the four-gallery survey, underscoring the role documentation has played in preserving work created in remote locations for brief periods.

Albuquerque is revisiting “Spine of the Earth,” one of her seminal pieces, for the exhibition. First created in 1980 in the Mojave Desert, the work involved students spreading red, yellow and black pigment in a geometric pattern more than 600 feet in diameter. Because the complete design could be seen only from above, most people encountered it through photographs.

The sacred figures he never saw: The artist painting Black angels across L.A. and the world The first mural in Anthony Pittman’s “Los Angelitos” project, outside Patria Coffee Roasters, is a twist on an early painting of California from 1832.

Albuquerque is adapting the work as a 40-by-40-foot installation. Rather than reproduce the desert experience, she said, the indoor presentation may alter the viewer’s physical relationship to the piece, allowing it to function as a “meditation centering device,” a description she attributed to French curator Lorenzo Béatrix.

Palm Springs Art Museum executive director and chief curator Christine Vendredi said experiencing the work in person offers something its documentation cannot.

“You’re missing the performance because you’re not there as it unfolds, but you can still see the result face-to-face, without the filter of a video or photograph,” she said. “You remove that distance.”

At High Desert Test Sites, about 40 miles from the museum, Albuquerque plans to embed cylindrical aluminum vessels packed with ultramarine pigment flush with the ground, creating a constellation of “star points” that guide visitors through a desert wash toward a rock formation. Developed during Albuquerque’s 2026 fellowship sponsored by the organization, “The Interval Between Things” continues her investigation of how people locate themselves within the landscape and the larger universe.

“It’s art that makes you think about what is not seen,” Albuquerque said. As for how long it will remain: “I will let nature take over.”

Albuquerque and Vendredi emphasize that “Cosmic Land” is a survey, not a retrospective, as the artist hopes to mount one in the next decade. Her other ambitions include completing the third film in her astronaut trilogy, realizing an ephemeral project across nine Mediterranean sites, publishing a monograph and returning to the Venice Biennale, where “Liquid Light” was presented in 2022.

She regards the Palm Springs exhibition not as a summation but as another point in an expanding body of work.

Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic LandWhere: Palm Springs Art MuseumWhen: Oct. 16, 2026, to May 3, 2027Info: psmuseum.org

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