Art Party 2025 Honoree

Lita Albuquerque

Lita Albuquerque is a featured artist in Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945—1990.

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 identity as part of the universal.

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, three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship grant, a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the 2019 Laguna Art Museum Wendt Artist of the Year Award, and MOCA’s Distinguished Women in the Arts award.

Recent major exhibitions include 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; the 2018 Art Safiental Biennial, Switzerland; Desert X 2017; 20/20: Accelerando at USC Fisher Museum of Art; The Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.

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. A dedicated educator, Albuquerque has held many teaching appointments during her tenure, and was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.