Some artists paint the sky. Lita Albuquerque has spent nearly six decades trying to put you inside it. Her new survey, Lita Albuquerque: Cosmic Land, opens today, October 16, at Palm Springs Art Museum, and according to the museum it is the first time her paintings, sculptures, installations and films have been brought together in one exhibition.
If you know the Light and Space movement through Robert Irwin, this is your chance to meet the artist who carried those ideas out into the desert, down to Antarctica and up into the stars. Irwin was her mentor. The Mojave was her canvas.
Who is Lita Albuquerque?
Born in Santa Monica in 1946 and raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, Albuquerque has been making work since the early 1970s across sculpture, painting, poetry, performance and huge temporary pieces in remote places. She is often linked with both the Light and Space and Land Art movements. She represented the United States at the Sixth International Cairo Biennale and took its top prize. With a National Science Foundation artist grant, she created Stellar Axis: Antarctica, which the museum describes as the first and largest ephemeral artwork ever made on that continent. Her work sits in the collections of the Met, the Getty, the Whitney, LACMA and MOCA.
Back in 2014 she wrote a line that powers this whole show: "light carries information."
Four rooms, one trip
Cosmic Land runs across four galleries, and it plays like a journey from the ground to the stars.
You are greeted by NAJMA Returns (Guardian of the Earth) from 2023, a sculpture of Najma, a 25th century female astronaut who seeds consciousness across the universe. She is a character from Albuquerque's unpublished manuscript GENIUS REMEMBERED, and she keeps reappearing through the show. Around her hang new Wind Paintings from 2026, made with the movement of the air itself as a collaborator.
The main gallery holds Spine of the Earth, her landmark earthwork first made on a dry lakebed in the Mojave Desert with powdered pigment and sacred geometry. It was meant to be temporary, and it has lived on through documentation, performance and rebuilds, with dates now reading 1980, 2024 and 2026. Next to it, Emanation from 2022 throws light around the room with gold leaf.
The third room is about light and water. Solar Disc 6,000 BC, Mali, a small gold sculpture from 2021, sits near two films, 20/20: Accelerando from 2016 and Liquid Light from 2022, which follow Najma across Earth and space. Liquid Light was shown as a collateral event at the 2022 Venice Biennale.
The room you will be posting
The finale is Particle Horizon from 2014, pictured above. A cast of the artist's own body lies at rest under projections of the stars moving over the North Pole, the South Pole and the Equator, skies no single person could ever see at once. Spoken passages from GENIUS REMEMBERED fill the space. It is part planetarium, part tomb, part spaceship, and it is the kind of room that stops conversations.
"Lita Albuquerque brings that inquiry to a deeply human question: how do we understand our place within the vastness of the universe?" says Christine Vendredi, the museum's executive director and chief curator.
Plan your visit
Cosmic Land is in the Main Museum through May 3, 2027, so there is plenty of time for a desert weekend. Palm Springs is also a design pilgrimage in its own right, and the museum's own 1975 flagship building was designed by E. Stewart Williams. Dig into more of her projects on her official works archive before you go.
More art that swallows a whole room: Tarek Atoui's HOLD at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, the new mirror work at teamLab Borderless in Tokyo, and the West Coast art scene at the LACMA Art+Film Gala.
