Artist Lita Albuquerque opened an exhibition at the Palm Springs Museum of Art

Artist Lita Albuquerque walks through the Malibu home where she and her husband, writer Carey Peck, moved into a few weeks ago. White walls and large windows keep the mountains and ocean in view, while a blue door opens to the entryway, capped by a 24-carat gold-leaf dome. Below, a circle of polished black granite set into green marble reflects the dome; It’s a nod to Albuquerque’s 1989 public artwork “Site, Memory, Reflection” and the architecture of his childhood in Tunisia.

The house took eight years to build on the site of the couple’s previous home, which burned down in 2018. woolsey feverAlbuquerque’s studio, along with his archives and many of his paintings.

The home’s dissolving inner boundary suits an artist who has spent his career questioning where people fit into the vastness of space and time. The 80-year-old Albuquerque native describes his work as examining the limits of human perception and asking what lies beyond.

But he doesn’t dwell on what was lost.

“I don’t even think about the fire anymore, I mean at all,” he said. “Look at this,” he added, pointing around. “This is a very different life and I’m very excited about it.”

Albuquerque has a lot to look forward to. A survey of her work “Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Country” opens Friday at the Palm Springs Museum of Art. And on November 14, his installation “The Gap Between Things” opens at A to Z West in Joshua Tree; artist Andrea Zittel’s 80-acre campus currently serves as the headquarters for High Desert Test Sites, a nonprofit organization that offers experimental, site-specific art.

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

He was born in Santa Monica, Albuquerque, but grew up in Tunisia and Paris, returning to California with his family at age 11. It emerged in the California art world in the 1970s in conjunction with the Light and Space movement, which explored perception through light and the environment. He was also a pioneer in land art, which uses the landscape as both space and material.

His practice has long encompassed painting, film and performance; It explores the body’s relationship with landscape and space using movement, gesture and culture. By spreading pigment across the desert floor, transforming the participants’ choreography into a living drawing, or appearing in his own films, Albuquerque brings human presence to environments that can dwarf scale.

Artist Lita Albuquerque at a house in Malibu that was being rebuilt after the first house burned in the 2018 Woolsey fire.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

He found the language that would help describe his work with “Malibu Line” (1978), in which he filled a trench along a coastal cliff with ultramarine pigment. The ephemeral piece introduced an approach he would take to the desert, using intense color to combine the scale of the human body with the vastness of the ground and sky. This research eventually took him far beyond California: In 2006, he led a team of artists, scientists, and other experts to Antarctica to create “Star Axis,” which positioned 99 blue spheres on the Ross Ice Shelf to correspond to the stars above.

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

“20/20:Accelerando” (2016), video installation. It was installed in the USC Fisher Museum of Art in 2016.

(USC Fisher Museum of Art)

“If you think about who his contemporaries and peers were, there’s something quite radical about the way he put his body into a lot of this work, especially his early work,” Grossman said. “There is a lot of work involved in both the setup and performance.”

Spanning five decades, the Palm Springs exhibition showcases Albuquerque’s multimedia practice through paintings, sculptures, installations, and films, as well as presenting contemporary iterations of earlier works.

Visitors will be greeted at the museum’s entrance by “NAJMA Returns (Guardian of the Earth)” (2023), a sculpture of an imaginary 25th-century female astronaut. The figure helps introduce the exhibition’s examination of humanity’s relationship with nature; Albuquerque imagines the character as a creator of landscaping projects and considers him his alter ego.

“Particle Horizon” (2014), video projection. It was installed at the Laguna Museum of Art in 2014.

(Laguna Museum of Art)

Versions of the astronaut also appear in the films “20/20: Accelerando” (2016) and “Liquid Light” (2022), which will be shown at the museum. Both feature his daughter, dancer and choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque, who performed in “The Sea Within Me,” performed live at the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern in Houston in 2025.

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

“He was into art and was making very personal things like figure pieces, stars, moons. The universe was already there,” Preston said. “He was also interested in performance and theater at the time.”

Grossman calls Albuquerque “an artist’s artist,” citing his openness about the way he works and his generosity toward other artists.

“Liquid Light” (2022). Video installation. Held as a Companion Event to the 59th La Biennale di Venezia Biennial; Arte 2022 at Venice Olivolo; and at MAXXI in Rome in 2025.

(of Ugo Carmen)

“No matter where he is performing and whoever he is performing with, he brings with him a lot of people who really look up to him as mentors,” Grossman said. “And I think she does it with great grace.”

The four-gallery survey will be accompanied by a carousel of 135 slides dating from 1976 to 1996, highlighting the role documentation plays in the ephemeral preservation of works created in remote locations.

For the exhibition, Albuquerque revisits one of his seminal pieces, “The Spine of the World.” First created in the Mojave Desert in 1980, the work involved students spreading red, yellow, and black pigment in a geometric pattern more than 600 feet in diameter. Most people saw it through photos, as the entire design was only visible from above.

Albuquerque is adapting the work as a 40 x 40 foot installation. Rather than reproducing the desert experience, he said, the indoor presentation could alter the viewer’s physical relationship with the work, allowing it to function as a “centering tool for meditation,” a description he attributed to French curator Lorenzo Béatrix.

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

“You miss the performance because you’re not there as it unfolds, but you can still see the outcome in person without a video or photo filter,” he said. “Take that distance away.”

At the High Desert Testing Grounds, about 40 miles from the museum, Albuquerque plans to bury cylindrical aluminum containers filled with ultramarine pigment into the ground, creating a constellation of “star points” that will guide visitors toward a rock formation in the desert. Developed during Albuquerque’s 2026 fellowship sponsored by the organization, “The Gap Between Things” continues its exploration of how people position themselves in the landscape and the larger universe.

“Art is what makes you think about the unseen,” Albuquerque said. As for how long he’ll stay: “I’ll let nature take over.”

Albuquerque and Vendredi emphasize that “Cosmic Country” is a study, not a retrospective, as the artist hopes to produce such a work within the next decade. His other goals include completing the third film of his Astronaut trilogy, realizing an interim project in nine Mediterranean locations, publishing a monograph and returning to the Venice Biennale in 2022, where “Liquid Light” was presented.

He sees the Palm Springs exhibition not as a compendium but as another point in an expanding body of work.

“There’s a lot to do,” he said.