I had the pleasure of speaking with Lita Albuquerque, renowned for her contributions to the Light and Space and Land Art Movements. She was born in Santa Monica, California, in 1946 and raised during her formative years in Carthage, Tunisia, and Paris, France.

Lita's childhood memories in Tunisia are an ongoing source for her art. It is as if she has taken the blue from the Mediterranean Sea and the doors in Sidi Bou Said and reimagined them into her artwork as blue spheres, mark-making with blue non-toxic powdered pigment poured into trenches, dusted onto rocks, and geometric shapes rendered with pigment. In addition to blue, we see recurring colors in her art, such as gold. She used honey to represent the color gold poured into hand-blown Venetian glass spheres in her multidimensional experience, Liquid Light. Red is a prominent color in Lita’s palette, and hundreds of volunteers wore red in Spine of the Earth.

Lita’s work often exhibits a cinematic quality. For instance, in Liquid Light, she elaborates on the myth of Lake Titicaca, filmed in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. Her daughter Jasmine, a choreographer, dancer, and instructor, portrays a twenty-fifth-century astronaut. Jasmine frequently collaborates with her mother.

We can see the influence of Yves Klein in her work with powdered blue pigment, which is interesting as he was born and raised on the other side of the Mediterranean in Nice, France, and the influences of Land Art artists Richard Long and Robert Smithson. I can also see Calder's color palette in her work, and her placement of rocks and geometric shapes nod to Eastern influences.

As an armchair traveler, Lita’s art has transported me to the Mediterranean, and now a little bit of the blue of her beloved childhood home in Tunisia is in me. Lita and her husband, Cary Peck, are recreating their Malibu home in a Tunisian style. They had previously lost their home and her art studio in 2018 in the Woolsey Fire.

Lita is showing in two exhibitions, Something in the Water at the MAXXI Museum in Rome through August 17th and American Minimal at the San Diego Museum of Art through June 1st.

How did spending your formative years in Tunisia influence your art?

Well, I mean, I can tell you right off the bat in terms of color and the kind of work I do has everything to do with my upbringing in Tunisia, which was in a Catholic convent in Carthage overlooking the Mediterranean. I was there from a very early age, like from three to ten, except for the summers.

You lived at the convent?

My parents were essentially the stories that were told to me through religion, but there were all stories, stories of the Mediterranean and the Earth. I mean, that's how I communicated with them and much more. I didn't have parents to essentially raise me.

Was it very unusual to live at a convent at such a young age?

Yeah, but the positive thing about that was that because, I mean, I didn't like the discipline, and I did like the education. I couldn't attach myself to them. They weren't very nice. So, I did attach myself to the earth, and the Mediterranean, and to the stories they were telling me. So that’s the ground of my being. It's the ground of my well, everything I do, my expression. All the work can really be explained through that lens from a very early age to having attached myself to this incredible, imaginative myth. The earth beneath my feet, which was so historical, and Carthage and the history there, I could feel the history beneath my feet, and the Mediterranean, which was constant, and the blue. I lived next door to a famous village called Sidi Bou Said.

Was it a big shock for you to return to California at age eleven?

Well, it wasn't a return. I was five months old when I'd left, you know, so it's still a shock. It's barely not becoming a shock, but it's taken to a lifetime. Yeah, it was, it was really hard.

How did the Woolsey Fire affect you?

In November of 2018, we lost everything in the fire. My daughter was home at the time. I lost all my work, everything. I called my daughter right before when I knew the fire was close. I was not home. I said: Grab my hard drives.

Did the fire impact the film, Liquid Light for the Venice Biennale in 2022?

I wasn't even thinking about the film. I was thinking about all my work. And, she grabbed some of them, and the film was in there. I had it; had she not been there that day, we would never have that film. So, it has put a history plus between us. It was quite a very seminal time, and very important.

Are you an empath?

I think I'm a stone empath. Every time I'm near stones or monuments, I actually hear things. I was near the pyramids and I just saw in my mind, I saw the earth from space that had nothing on it but gold-tipped pyramids all aligned to the stars. What can I do? I can't do gold-tipped pyramids, but I can do points of stars on the earth, and I had done that.