Lita Albuquerque is featured in the encyclopedic Aware database of women artists.
While establishing her studio practice in the early 1970s in Venice Beach, California, like many of her contemporaries, L. Albuquerque was drawn to respond to the context in which she was working, specifically the Southern California landscape and light. Working in proximity with other Light and Space artists such as Robert Irwin (1928–2023), Robert Smithson (1938–1973), Nancy Holt (1938–2014), and James Turell (1943–), she expanded her abstract minimalist investigations as interventions within the landscape. Merging both the sensibilities of sculpture and painting, her first earthwork, entitled Malibu Line (1978), shifted the viewer’s perception of the horizon line, drawing one’s line of sight from the land towards the ocean to the sky, following a stripe of blue mineral pigment on a cliff side. The materiality of the work meant the work eroded with time, eventually becoming faded and overgrown. She continued to develop large-scale ephemeral Land Art installations with works such as Rock and Pigment (1978) and Man and the Mountain II (1979) and Outlining the Mountain (1979), which engaged notions of movement, perception, colour and light, in relation to the Earth’s rotation, cosmology and archaeoastronomy.
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