artist and citizen of worlds – all of them · (2012), painter wayne thiebaud (2013), light and...
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Artist and Citizen of Worlds – All of Them
Lita Albuquerqueby Daniella B. Walsh
n September 21 of this year, the Laguna Art Museum honored multi-faceted artist Lita Albuquerque with the 2019 Wendt Award at a well-attended gala that netted the museum $600,000 to help
propel it into its next century.
Named after William Wendt, the great California landscape painter and a founder of the Laguna Beach Art Association, The Wendt Award was established by LAM to honor artists as well as art professionals, supporters and proponents for their contribution to California art.
Past recipients have included writer and museum supporter Ruth Westphal (2012), painter Wayne Thiebaud (2013), Light and Space artist Peter Alexander (2014), art collector and museum supporter Yvonne Boseker (2016), and Tony DeLap (2017).
A sculpture installation by Lita and a dance performance by Jasmine Albuquerque enthralled 270 attendees. A mother-daughter collaboration titled “Ash,” the creation is based on the loss of the Albuquerque home/studio and its artifacts and the power of positivity creating this dialogue between visual art and dance and a future for all arts.
R e cent ly MS: A l b u q u e r q u e s p o k e w i t h Art Highlights Magazine writer Daniella Walsh about her life and continuously evolving art, the artist’s spiritual and intellectual connection to the universe as a whole and, most importantly, her firm belief in the future, manifested in her devotion to her family and in her determination to rebuild after the devastating loss of her home and studio during the recent Woolsey fire.
DW: Lita, a part of the reason for this story is that you are receiving the Wendt Award from the Laguna Art Museum. Do you see the award as recognition for your enormous body of work involving the environment? Do you feel a connection to past artists who, albeit dissimilarly, glorified nature?
LA: My first impetus as an artist comes from nature and my response to it. It begs me to question my relationship to it and, as S. Giedion, the great architectural historian, says, “Man’s (our) desire to understand his (our) relationship to the environment is the beginning of Art.” That relationship
piques my curiosity and gives me sustenance as well as experiences of the sublime, of beauty and terror, and what motivates me to make art.
I am interested in creating art that makes us aware of our environment and also to create experiences through my performances that make viewers notice their response to it. I believe that in order to survive it is crucial to understand what our environment is, as well as our relationship to it. My art is the expression of those questions. It is about the trajectory of our time here on Earth, and yes, I do feel a connection to past artists who have glorified nature, and especially to those who probe deeper to express that sublimity.
DW: You have worked in concert with many environments the world over – beaches, deserts, mountains, and monuments. What message regarding the environment, and its state when you made the works, do you want to impart? Briefly tell us what your work does to enhance and help the environment and environmental causes.
LA: I want people to look around and see how connected they are. I want them to see their uniqueness and that this uniqueness has
a subjectivity which needs to be expressed. Through their uniqueness and subjectivity in response to, let’s say, my art or to any other art, they become aware of our interconnectedness. My work is about extending that connectedness not only to our environment here on planet earth but to our solar system, our galaxy and beyond. My main interest is always about being conscious of where the planet and the body are in space-time…We all know that we are related to the stars, but to be fluent in that language is to understand our connectivity and to open up the body to the sublime. I want my viewer to come away from my work with a bit more insight into where they are within the cosmos.
DW: What inspired you to become an artist? What inspired you to the
work that you did in the beginning of your career?
LA: It was not an inspiration that came from the outside, it was an internal knowing from a very young age that I had to express myself. I originally fell in love with the theater when I lived in Paris at the age of five. I begged my mother at the time to leave me with a theater company so I could study theater and dance.
When we moved to this country from Tunisia, I thought I would be a philosopher and a poet. By the time I was 19, studying at UCLA, all my friends were artists and filmmakers, and painting and acting became my passion. I was part of a small theater company and one day as I was rehearsing on stage, playing the role of a 13-year-old, I left in the middle of the rehearsal. I wanted to express my own words, not enact someone else’s. Action of a girl in her twenties of course, but nevertheless…
In the beginning of my career, I was drawing, and made large charcoal drawings on paper, gestural marks that expressed in an abstract manner what I was seeing in nature. When I became aware of Conceptual Art and Performance Art and Land Art and
“Particle Horizon” at the Laguna Art Museum, October 12, 2014–January 18, 2015, featuring the work“Pigment Figure No. 1” (2012)
“Transparent Earth Part I,” Land Art Installation for the “Horizontal-Vertical” Biennale Safiental Valley, Switzerland, July 7–October 21, 2018
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saw Robert Irwin’s work, my whole perspective on what art is shifted. It was no longer about making marks on a two-dimensional surface but about making marks out in space and in relationship to the environment. The world became my canvas.
DW: What inspires you now? Is there a leitmotif, so to speak, between then and now?
LA: I am inspired by declaration. I remember when I read about Arman and (Yves) Klein who claimed “Plenitude” and “The Sky,” it made me ask myself, what is it that I claim? I realized that I claim the relationship between the earth and the heavens. That declaration is the leitmotif between then and now. I am still expressing that relationship as I did from the very beginning, as in Malibu Line (1978), but it now is expressed in multimedia and performative
works. What had remained in text form became part of an installation as in Particle Horizon shown at the Laguna Art Museum and 2020 Accelerando at the USC Fisher Museum.
I am also inspired by our time. The 21st century is the century of artists. There are many more artists now than there have ever been who are doing significant and inspiring works in response to it. We are coming in as spiritual warriors by the thousands, giving visions and expressions of who we are and who we can be.
DW: Do you feel a special consciousness as a woman artist? Does gender even come into play?
LA: Of course, I feel a special consciousness as a woman artist, but I do not create work from that place. I create from vision, which happens to be a feminine one. It is not something I consciously do, but look around at what is happening on the social level, and I am not afraid to express it. Many of my recent works are generated from a narrative I wrote in 2003 about a 25th-century female astronaut sent to 6000 BC to seed interstellar consciousness on earth. It is no accident that this character is female; it could not be otherwise. She speaks to the new model of the cosmos. We are birthing a new world.
DW: The wealth and variety of your ideas appear boundless. How does an idea, a concept first take root in your mind? Is it a concrete process, do you see shapes, ready-made images or do ideas evolve in segments? Experiences? Conversations? Dreams (for example)?
LA: That is possibly the hardest question to answer, as ideas stem from a variety of avenues and come in many forMS: Sometimes (often), an image appears whole in my mind and I chase it, figuring out how to make it into a visual piece. Sometimes, it is a phrase that I have written that starts the whole process. Other times (often), it comes in conversations, and it is a gift. At other times, it is a struggle while trying to figure it out by thinking or drawing and grinding it through until my head hurts.
I tend to use the biological model for creativity, setting up the right conditions and then letting it happen. Those conditions can be a lot of research: I read a lot about whatever interests me, which tends to be astronomy, or architecture, or philosophy, or pull from ancient traditions and imagine future ones. For instance, when I was asked to participate in The Art and Nature Conference for the Laguna Art Museum in 2014, the process of getting to the idea of what I wanted to do started with looking at a lot of sites around the city and figuring out which one to use so that I could come up with an idea that would be in context with the environment. Once I zeroed in on Main Beach, the idea became whole in my mind. The arc and sweep of the beach were a natural, and I wanted to emphasize the arc of Main Beach.
I had started to use people instead of pigment in my work with Spine of the Earth 2012, done for the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival.
For the Laguna piece, I wanted participants to be like an echo of the arc of the beach.
I decided to use 300 people positioned at the edge of the water to form a human arc, echoing the white waters of the cresting of the waves. The original idea was to have each person stand and watch the sunrise, the noontime sun, and the setting sun. I titled it “An Elongated Now.” As people had to stand there looking at the sun for an entire day, the idea was twofold: One was a visual that could be seen from the air, and the other was to have people experience that kind of relationship to the sun, and hence to the rotation of the planet.
What also motivated me was the desire to set up a condition for participants to experience wonder of our existence on planet earth and for each of them to be the art. It is important to me that it be not just a singular experience but that it be a collective one as well. That shifts the playing field for me.
There are so many parts to a work like “An Elongated Now”: The experience for the participants, the visual impact of the image of a drawing created by human bodies to show the two-dimensional, the three-dimensional and the fourth dimension (time) element.
DW: Much of your work is informed by specific scientific knowledge. How did/do you acquire it?
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Astronomy comes to mind. Do you work with scientists, consultants, and teams? You have collaborated with several architects. Have you studied architecture?
LA: A lot of my interest is in science and architecture. I have also built a library full of references to art, history, spirituality, architecture, philosophy, and astronomy. I continually refer to the notes and ideas I’ve learned from these fields of study.
I have worked with scientists, consultants and teams, and it was mainly because the work itself asked for other fields of expertise. The work itself asked questions that needed to be answered by other fields of knowledge. I have not studied architecture, but my best friend is an architect and there was a point in time where every single person in my life was an architect. In the mid-seventies, when I was doing the pigment work in the desert, my friend Pamela Burton, a landscape architect, introduced me to the entire UCLA architecture department, and their work made me think a lot about space. Actually, what they taught me the most is about context, that a project, whether it is a building or a work of art, is always in a context and therefore should speak to that context. That revolutionized my way of working.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have also collaborated with singers, composers, dancers, and filmmakers toward whatever it takes to make a
particular project work.
DW: What would you consider pivotal projects, events, and journeys in your career? How would you describe the impetuses for your enormous growth and depth?
LA: Representing the United States in the Cairo Biennale for Sol Star; receiving a grant from the National Science Foundation for Stellar Axis: Antarctica, the largest environment work in the continent of Antarctica; participating with The Washington Monument Project in the International Sculptural Conference in Washington DC; being part of the Biennial in Desert X with hEARTH; and at the Hirshhorn Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and being a founding member and member of the Artist Advisory committee for Museum of Contemporary Art were all important events in my career. Then there are projects on the horizon I cannot talk about yet, that feel pivotal as well; it keeps on coming and it seems like a natural course for the development of the 25th-century Female Astronaut to establish and complete her mission. She needs time and space, and I am there creating projects for her and enabling her to make it happen. In terms of journey, certainly the impetuses for my work are
based on the extraordinary support I get from my husband Carey Peck, who is by my side and involved in all aspects of our lives at all times, and a very strong family bond with all of my children and their spouses as well as my brother Fred, who is based in Laguna Beach. It is also based on the consistent team of people and friends I have around me who help me produce and create the work as well as the various teams of people for the different projects.
DW: What propelled you from drawing and painting into installations and performance art?
LA: I came of age as an artist in the seventies, at the time when Conceptual, Minimal, Installation, Performance and Land Art were flourishing. Even though my background was painting and drawing, I soon became fascinated with the works of Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Irwin, Jim Turrell, Richard Serra. There was a permission to expand the field to explode the idea of painting into the environment and to take into consideration the context in which the works were seen. The most powerful propeller was seeing Robert Irwin’s exhibit at the Riko Mizuno Gallery in 1976 in which he had placed a band of black tape on the walls of the gallery at mid-point of the wall or at a horizon line. That black line at the horizon turned the entire space into two cubes; it was no longer a line as a drawing, but a line as a marker that determines space and dimension; the work was the negative space itself. He had simply identified it with one gesture, which propelled me to go into the environment and simply make a mark.
What I became interested in was not the context of architecture, but of nature, and of the earth and beyond. My first works were all simple marks in relation to the horizon line of the ocean, or to the setting moon, or to the sky. I took Irwin’s idea a bit further by making the context nature. I also owe my working outdoors to the Land Artists of the sixties, and was curious about and questioned what it would be like to use color against the neutral background of the desert. Again, in the beginning I always thought as a painter, but since I was working directly on the earth, the inquiry multiplied into a complexity of questions that, in order to resolve, took in other disciplines, like sacred geometry, astronomy, philosophy, and especially ideas of space and time.
DW: What nourishes your soul in all your work?
LA: Nature, family and love, allowing the ancient to move within me.
DW: Do you work on several projects simultaneously or do you finish each individual one first? Do you shift between installations and paintings, for example?
LA: We have a lot of work coming in the studio, which requires working on multiple projects at once. Between painting commissions, gallery exhibitions which require the creation of completely new work, public projects, performances and films I am working on, and performative work, I do them simultaneously, and they inform one another. For instance, right now I am working on a proposal for a large ephemeral artwork in the desert; an installation for a biennial; a commissioned piece for the Huntington Gardens; two gallery exhibitions; and shows in Paris, China and Brussels. So yes, I shift from the one to the other the work informs other works. The work I create requires my focus be directed in multiple directions. So, I do shift between making, researching, and writing on a daily basis since each project has its own timeline. This workflow keeps me inspired to continually create and activate the ideas of my work so that I truly embody them.
DW: For some larger projects such as An Elongated Now and others of that kind, how large a team do you require, and what do such teams consist of?
LA: Most of my work is rather large and does require the participation of a team. I have my regular team at the studio that consists of an administrative team as well as assistants in the studio. Of course, it varies project by project. For An Elongated Now I had 300 participants, which required a production team of six and a team on the ground of 15. The participants were not performers and had to be instructed in the movement and choreography of the piece and in the intentionality of the performance. We had an overall meeting in which both myself and the choreographer, my daughter Jasmine Albuquerque, spoke about what the participants should expect. We had 10 team leaders (dancers) who would take 25 people at a time and instruct them in the movement. Then there was the team of assistants about five who kept people off the shore. And in the conceptualization and administration and producing of the project there were another six in the studio. The six production team members also coordinated costumes, also making sure all 300 people were taken care of (transportation, water, food, etc.).
My studio is essential for creating a work of that scale. I usually have a smaller team
of talented artists and art thinkers who assist me to build the parameters around a piece, and then we begin to put it out into the world.
DW: You are also an educator. What do you find most rewarding in teaching?
LA: I have been teaching since 1975 and been a member of the Core Faculty in the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College for the last 32 years. There are many rewards including seeing the new crop of talent that comes up with every new class and over the years has given me a very special perspective on artists coming up. Graduate school is very special in that we work very closely with each individual artist and witness each creative process on the ground level. Added to that is the close proximity of my colleagues, which puts us all as witness to many different perspectives on art and which is very inspiring.
Albuquerque
Lita Albuquerque 2018 solo exhibition at Peter Blake Gallery (Laguna Beach) featuring paintings from Albuquerque’s “Auric Field” series
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“Untitled (Auric Field Series),” 2019, Pigment on Panel and Gold Leaf on Resin, 60 x 60 inches
DW: What advice do you have for young artists? Do you see yourself as a role model?
LA: I feel that the main objective in graduate school is to direct each artist in examining how they think and how to think through the creative process. The advice that I have is twofold: To keep to their vision while simultaneously understanding art history and where they fit into that lineage, to keep pushing boundaries, and to always remember that art is revolutionary and has the capacity to shift paradigms, which is what culture is all about.
DW: What in your opinion, briefly, is the importance of art in our schools in this age?
LA: Art is usually the first to be underfunded and overlooked, but I tend to believe that a society that honors and embraces the art made in its time is one which is thriving and prosperous. Therefore, studying art is non-negotiable in order to enable a healthy world.
DW: About you: When you do not make art or think up new projects what else do you like to do? Dance appears to have an influence on your performance pieces; does music inspire you and if yes, what kind?
LA: I have a daily ritual of writing and meditating and running on the beach and doing what I call Energetic Meditation and then swimming in the ocean. In terms of what I love is being with my family and traveling. Reading and yes, music and dance, are a big part of my life. One of my favorite things to do is watching dancers rehearse. I also love spending time with friends, running on the beach, looking at art, traveling, listening to Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and studying other cultures.
DW: You are married with four grown children. Are all of them artists as well? Is your husband an artist?
LA: All my children are creative, my eldest, Isabelle, is a sculptor and actor and has an innovative design company, Osk, with her husband, Jon Beasley. Marisa has a communication company Hello Human, and Jasmine is a dancer and choreographer and has been my muse and collaborator. She embodies the character of the Twenty-Fifth Century Female Astronaut. Her partner, Emeka Simmons, is a dancer and musician as well. My son Christopher is an educator in social justice and literature and is right now traveling the world. My husband writes poetry and is a skydiver.
DW: What books do you enjoy? Do you have a favorite?
LA: I had an extensive library and currently mainly read non-fiction but love Murakami and all the magical realists. A couple of my favorite books are 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami and 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; also (work by) Italo Calvino. I was bred on all the French writers and poets – Chateaubriand, Andre Gide, Marguerite Duras, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Laurence Durrell; The Alexandria Quartet remains one of my favorites. Of course I try and get my hands on as many artists’ writings as I can, and Robert Irwin is one of my bibles. I frequently return to a book by Thomas Berry called The Great Work. It was published in 2000, and he speaks to our being at the end of a story and that what we need is a new story of us in the cosmos.
I have been saying for a long time now that we are experiencing a revolution in perspective as major as the revolution in perspective of the Renaissance. Now that we have landed on the moon and are able to see ourselves from outside ourselves, what we about and how the time
we are in has created a major revolution in perspective. I think this began for us during the 1969 moon landing. It was the first time we saw ourselves from outer space, and it totally changed the way we collectively see our relationship to the cosmos.
DW: You were born in Santa Monica. How did you wind up in Tunisia and in France? What influence did that sojourn have on your formative years? Adult thinking?
LA: Even though I was born here my mother went back to her country when I was five months old, and I was raised in Tunisia until the age of 12. We moved between Tunisia and Paris, and I had a French . It was not a sojourn as it was my grounding in my foundational years; being raised in a Catholic convent in Carthage, in an Islamic country, and of Jewish origin had a profound effect on my impressionable mind.
I have written extensively about how the sense of freedom I had living at home in the summers in a fishing village by the sea, and in the convent in historic Carthage during the school years affected me very much. Having experienced the sense of history that exists in Carthage and in the earth itself, the ceaseless proximity to nature, to the African wind and to the cross-cultural, it was a shock to move to the United States. It took many years for me to adjust. A lot of my work stems from that dislocation and a desire to locate myself in the world and the cosmos and find a sense of identity. It wasn’t until I came to the United States that the qualities which formed my
Albuquerque
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cultural identity started to make themselves known to me. I had to learn English, and settle in an unknown place, and that experience left a great impression on me. It may also be why I have a strong urge to control my navigation through the cosmos.
DW: Last but not least, the fire. Now that some time has passed, how do you still process the experience? Were you able to salvage any of your work/materials? What about the famous, lovely Lita Blue? What are your plans for the immediate future? Further down the line?
LA: The fire has been hard and a second big shock in my life. I had reconstructed a sense of Tunisia there and had raised all four of my children wanting them to have that sense of freedom away from consensus reality and proximity to nature and to the stars at night. We had bought the property especially for the dark skies and observation of the stars, as well as its panoramic view of the ocean and the nooks and crannies of trees and cabins all over the property. It was a refuge, and a sanctuary, not only to us but to the many friends who came and lived here occasionally, as well as to the creative teams of my children’s friends who created numerous music videos. There were weddings that were held there, the many parties (we had two parties annually New Year’s Eve as well as my husband Carey Peck’s famous Pasta and Poetry event every summer where our friends shared and read poetry under the Chinese Elm tree) and the accumulation of the history of my family. My creative life was embedded there, the germination of many ideas and the accumulation of ideas and memories. The memories do stay inside, and we have them, my family is intact, and I am very grateful.
It was a firestorm that took our neighborhood, and nothing remained, nothing was salvageable. My friend Ami Sioux and her partner Dai Sakai did spend 11 days digging in the
rubble and came up with an incredible array of artifacts that they have displayed at the Barn where we live. It is very comforting to have found those even though they are now artifacts but nevertheless part of our history. I have to say that I would not have been able to be here standing without the extraordinary angels that came to our side: Lauren Bon, Ami Sioux and Dai Sakai, Ellen Grinstein, Jack Hoffman, Chuck Arnoldi, David Hertz and Lauren Doss; the entire Metabolic Studio team, Homeira Goldstein, Linda Wolfe, my dealers, Peter Blake and Michael Kohn; my entire studio team, Kyomi Matsuura, Fabia Panjarian, Ami Sioux, Sarah Miska; and all the beautiful people who contributed to GoFundMe and to the fundraiser Homeira
Goldstein organized.
We are planning to rebuild and are working with an architect. What has happened makes me believe in the power of art. Beside all the support I receive, it is also the work that pulls me through and is propelling me forward.
DW: Many artists inspire us from all periods of art history. Could you tell us what artists you admire(d) and who inspired/inspires you?
L A: The anc ient Egyptians, the Mayans, the Islamic world of the 9th,10th and 11th centuries, Giotto. I
have been moved by Malevich, Kandinsky, the Russian Constructivists. I studied with Robert Irwin, and the work of Susan Kaiser Vogel has been really important to me, as well as James Lee Byars, Yves Klein, Richard Serra, James Turrell, the Light and Space artists as well as John Cage and Laurie Anderson. I draw huge inspiration from the works of theater director Robert Wilson and composer Philip Glass.
Q: We see you as the proverbial Phoenix rising from the ashes. What direction do you think your future art will take?
LA: That has yet to be determined. I feel like I have a new sense of freedom that will allow me to make whatever work I need to.
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