Living quietly in the Malibu area for decades, few people realize resident Lita Albuquerque is a world-class artist whose work is exhibited and sought-after by museums and collectors around the globe.
Los Angeles Times art critic Kristine McKenna refers to her as a “second generation light and space artist,” work ing in various mediums, including paintings, sculptures, photography and video.
Albuquerque is just the kind of artist that members of the Malibu Cultural Arts Commission hope to get networked into the local artist’s community through its Salon Series program.
Richard Gibbs, the commission member who spearheaded the program and is an artist himself (keyboardist and composer) said, “Malibu has the greatest number of artists per capita in the world, and yet there’s no sense of community. It’s a human resource we want to tap into.”
Gibbs defines artist as just about anyone making a living in a creative field, including “directors, composers, actors, painters, sculptors, architects, jewelry makers, fashion designers, choreographers, set designers and musicians.”
The salon was hosted at Albuquerque’s Malibu home and studio – a woodsy area with spectacular mountain and ocean views. A group of about 25, all in attendance by-invitation-only, were led on a tour of the buildings and grounds that had formerly been used by various other well-known artists, including singer Linda Ronstadt and the group Jefferson Airplane.
As a child, Albuquerque said she lived between Tuna Canyon and Big Rock on 180 acres that were originally owned by comedy duo Abbott & Costello, and also lived near Decker Canyon. From 1968 to 1979, she lived in an artist’s colony in Malibu, which “was where I grew up as an artist,” she said.
“In Malibu, we face south, and can see the sun and the moon from east to west.”
She’s lived in her current house for the past 25 years, a former three-car garage that was artfully converted to a living space by a pair of set designers.
During her teen years, Albuquerque‘s family moved to Tunisia. “It’s Africa, it’s an intense feeling of nature. It was hard to leave the culture and the land” when the time came to return to the U.S.
“I thought I’d be a poet or an actress, but the painting just came out,” Albuquerque said. “I went to the earth and the land, and the connection between the earth and the sky.”
One of her art books, “Stellar Axis: Antarctica 2006,” chronicles Albuquerque’s expedition to the South Pole to create the first art installment ever on that continent, part of her plan for doing artworks around the world.
The art, which was photographed, consisted of 99 man-made cobalt blue spheres on the ice. The spheres were arranged to correspond to the locations of stars in the Antarctic sky. Over time, the motion of the earth’s rotation displaced the balls.
This project was followed by “Stellar Axis: North Pole 2007.” At least 10 other temporary art installations have also been completed and photographed, which she calls “ephemeral” works. Albuquerque is also in demand for various art installations and public works.
If there’s a signature to her work, it would be the cobalt blue/ultramarine pigment that Albuquerque buys in 50-pound bags. She uses it both as the background for many of her paintings and to color the spheres used in various installations.
She’s also known for ephemeral works that consist of hundreds of people all wearing the same color of clothing standing or moving in a line somewhere on the landscape. In a recently photographed work in Laguna Beach, 200 people dressed in white stood on the beach at sunset, each holding a ping-pong ball with a blue LED light inside.
Albuquerque ended the tour by playing a recent art video she made showing a prone blue figure in the middle of moving white star fields with sound and a voice over dialog she wrote herself.
The first event of the salon series was in August with Mike D. of the Beastie Boys in a recording studio, and the second was a visit to the studio of Point Dume artist Chuck Arnoldi in October. December’s event will be announced shortly, but all events are by invitation only. The series will continue in 2015. To be eligible for invitations, sign up at malibucity.org.
