Born: 1946, California, USA

Lita Albuquerque is an internationally renowned installation, environmental artist, painter and sculptor. She is committed to developing a visual language that brings the realities of vast time and space to a more human scale and is widely acclaimed for her ephemeral and permanent art works executed in the natural landscape and in public sites.

She was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Tunisia, North Africa and in Paris, France. At the age of eleven she finally settled with her family in the United States. In the 1970's Albuquerque emerged on the California art scene as part of the light and space movement and won acclaim for her epic and poetic ephemeral pigment pieces created for desert sites. She gained national attention in the late seventies with her ephemeral pigment installations pertaining to mapping, identity and the cosmos, executed and documented in the natural landscape. In 1980 Albuquerque garnered international acclaim for her pivotal installation, The Washington Monument Project. The recognition this daring work gained led to awards and commissions at major sites around the world, including the Great Pyramids, where she represented the United States at the International Cairo Biennale with her installation and exhibition ?Sol Star? which won the prestigious Cairo Biennale Prize.

Completing an ambitious array of public projects over the past decade, Albuquerque has been commissioned to work in a range of locations. Her newest ephemeral Earth Art work The Pole Project, a star map of blue diameters on ice planned for installation at both the North and South Poles for 2006 ?2007, will result in an exhibition of artwork, photographs and a documentary film.

Albuquerque's work questions what we are in the enormity of infinite space and eternal time. Despite a rising flood of new data and interpretive theory, the most elemental concepts of an emerging scientific cosmology are simply not imbedded in everyday culture. Conversely, the meaning of this cosmology does not seem implicit in the science.

Lita Albuquerque has not flinched from the scale of such a challenge. In a dazzling array of work at many scales and in a variety of media, she has worked to develop a visual language capable of bringing the realities of vast space and time to a more human scale.

In her work she seeks a place where we are no longer isolated beings but members of a global community which is profoundly connected to the natural universe. Her philosophical perspective is cosmological and her roots are in the Islamic culture she comes from.