In the Financial Times, Lucie Davies profiles Lita Albuquerque.
Lita Albuquerque subverted land art’s boys club — she’s finally getting her due
Perception was everything to the light & space and land art movements, when artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Walter De Maria and James Turrell sought to create situations or installations that made the viewer acutely aware of sensory experience. Unlike her male contemporaries, however, for whom huge, everlasting, often baroque statements were king, Albuquerque’s interventions have tended to be light-touch and impermanent. Most were unmade by rain, wind or plant growth long ago.
Last year, Albuquerque was one of 12 artists featured in the landmark exhibition Groundswell: Women of Land Art at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, which shifted the focus of that notoriously male-dominated movement towards the women working successfully — if less ostentatiously — among them. Was it a very macho scene? “As women, we were both considered and not considered. But there weren’t that many
of us, and I think at that time I wasn’t paying attention to whether we were being ignored. I mean, I knew we were, but the work was more important to me.”
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