Lita Albuquerque

High Desert Test Sites is honored to announce our 2026 Artist Fellow, Lita Albuquerque, whose expansive practice has shaped dialogues around land, perception, and the limits of human understanding. Over several decades, she has created works that move between remote landscapes and institutional contexts, articulating a sustained engagement with the elemental conditions that frame human experience.

This fellowship recognizes Albuquerque’s enduring influence and her deep connection to the desert as a generative environment for experimentation. Her work continues to open space for reflection on scale, presence, and the relationship between the individual and the unknown—concerns that remain central to the ethos of High Desert Test Sites.

Throughout 2026, Albuquerque will be spending intermittent periods of time in residence at HDTS while generating a new site-specific work, which is slated to open to the public on Saturday, November 14th, 2026. 

Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned multidisciplinary artist and writer known for a visual language that brings time and space to a human scale through ephemeral and permanent works in landscape and public sites. Born in Santa Monica and raised in Tunisia and Paris, she settled in the U.S. at age eleven. In the 1970s she emerged as part of California's Light and Space movement, gaining national attention for epic pigment installations exploring mapping, identity, and the cosmos.

Her work addresses humanity's place within infinite space and eternal time. Lita Albuquerque has never flinched from the scale of such a challenge.  She is one of the rare artists and humanists responsible for thoughtfully and imaginatively placing the elemental concepts for a living, functional cosmology for 21st century culture within public consciousness.

She represented the U.S. at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale,  winning its top prize, and has received numerous honors including three NEA Art in Public Places awards, an NEA Individual Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Artist Grant for her landmark work Stellar Axis — the largest ephemeral artwork ever created in Antarctica — a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellowship, the 2019 Laguna Art Museum Wendt Artist of the Year Award, and MOCA's Distinguished Women in the Arts award.

Major recent exhibitions include Pacific Standard Time at the Getty, Desert X 2017, Art Safiental Biennial 2018, Desert X AlUla 2020, Light & Space at Copenhagen Contemporary, Lita Albuquerque: Liquid Light at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and Groundswell: Women of Land Art at Nasher Sculpture Center. Her work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Trust, the Whitney, LACMA, and MOCA, among others. She was on the core faculty of the Graduate Art Program at Art Center College of Design for 35 years.